Gmail is a popular email service used by business professionals and individuals alike, and if you’re wondering how to find Gmail archive, the quickest way is to open Gmail on your phone, tablet, or desktop, go to the All Mail label, and use Gmail’s search bar to find archived emails. Gmail doesn’t have a separate archive folder or mail folder in the traditional sense; archived Gmail messages are removed from the main inbox but remain on the Gmail server in All Mail, so you can still retrieve archived emails, old messages, follow-up email threads, and other important messages without risking deleting important messages.
To find your Gmail archive on your phone or tablet follow these steps:
- Open the Gmail app on your phone or tablet.
- Once logged in, tap the three horizontal lines (that look like a hamburger) in the top left of the screen. This will open the menu.
- Within the menu, click ‘All Mail’. This will show your mail, including archived messages.
- To find a specific archived mail within this list, simply use the search bar at the top of the screen to locate what you need. Search by sender name / keyword / subject title for example, or use in:archive to search for archived emails.
- From here you can then click the relevant email and read it.
To find your Gmail archive on your desktop browser follow these steps:
- Search for Gmail in your chosen browser and log into your account
- When in Gmail and you can see your inbox, look for the ‘All Mail’ label in the left hand toolbar. Click this label to see all the emails in your Gmail account, including those you’ve archived.
- To find a specific archived mail within this list, simply use the search bar at the top of the screen to locate what you need. Search by sender name / keyword / subject title for example, or use in:archive to locate archived emails faster.
- From here you can then click the relevant email and read it.
If you are looking for an email that you know you haven’t deleted, but can’t find it in your inbox, it’s likely that you archived it. Knowing how to find archived emails in Gmail helps you stay organised without losing access to messages you may need later, and the rest of this guide explains how archiving messages works in Gmail, how to archive a message, how to retrieve emails or move them back to the inbox, how to manage multiple emails, customise swipe action settings in the Gmail mobile app, and when to archive instead of delete archived messages. For further insight on email archiving and this feature within Gmail, read on.
How to Find Archived Emails in Gmail – A Summary
There are a few quick ways to find archived emails in Gmail:
- On desktop: Open Gmail, click More in the left-hand menu, then select All Mail. This shows emails in your inbox as well as messages you’ve archived.
- On the Gmail app: Tap the three-line menu in the top-left corner and select All Mail.
- Use Gmail search: Search for the sender, subject or keywords from the email. You can also use Gmail search operators to narrow down your results.
- Check for the Inbox label: Archived emails remain in your Gmail account but no longer have the Inbox label attached to them.
How to Restore an Archived Email
If you want to return an archived email to your inbox, open the message and select Move to Inbox from the toolbar. The email will then appear in your main inbox again. Those are the basics – but let’s break it all down in greater depth below.
What Is Gmail?
Gmail is used by millions of people all around the world to send, receive and store emails. Originally launched in 2004, it remains one of the world’s most widely used email services. Much of its appeal revolves around its user-friendly features including helpful search tools, simple interface, customisable themes and extremely useful ability to work alongside other Google services such as Drive, Calendar, Google Chat and Sheets. For those that like to remain organised, Gmail’s labels and filters, combined with the ability to automatically apply labels or skip the inbox based on predefined rules, make it a handy office assistant for work or personal email management.
Gmail Archiving – What Is It?
As briefly touched on already, there isn’t a separate archive folder in Gmail. Archived emails in Gmail remain available under All Mail after leaving the main inbox. Consider it like a ‘reference’ section of a library. Always available, but not front and centre. When an email is archived in Gmail, Gmail removes the Inbox label rather than moving it to a standalone mail folder, which is why archived messages can still be found in All Mail. You can access it whenever you need to and it won’t be deleted unless you manually move it to the Bin and it is then permanently deleted. Read more: Email etiquette: Top 10 tips when sending work emails
Why Use Email Archiving?
Whilst some people might only ever accidentally move their emails to the archive folders, others will actively use this feature as a handy way to manage their electronic communications – which can quickly mount up! Archiving is a useful feature when you want to keep a clutter free inbox, because archiving messages helps you stay organised while keeping important messages accessible without risking deleting important messages. For example, old messages or a follow-up email thread can be archived when they no longer need to sit in the inbox. If you have read an email you might want it out of your inbox, but if it’s useful to refer to later, maybe for legal reasons, then archiving that email can be a great way to keep it around and find it easily again in the future.
What Archive Settings Are Available?
Customising your Gmail archive settings is the key to ensuring that you manage your archived emails in a way that is useful to you and the way you work. Take a look at these ‘settings’ from Gmail for the best tips:
- To manage the All Mail label on desktop, open Gmail in your web browser.
- Click the gear icon in the top right corner of the screen and select ‘See all settings’ from the menu shown.
- From the settings menu, select ‘Labels’.
- Scroll down to the ‘Labels’ section to find the ‘All Mail’ label and choose whether to show or hide it in the label list.
- On the Gmail mobile app, you can also customise swipe actions so that swiping left or right on a message archives it.
- Gmail does not have a built-in setting that automatically archives messages simply because they have been read or have been sitting in the inbox for a set amount of time.
- You can, however, use filters to archive Gmail messages automatically based on sender, subject line or other criteria. This option can be located in the ‘Filters and Blocked Addresses’ tab under the settings menu. From here, click ‘Create a new filter’ and follow the prompts given to set the filter of your choice. When using the ‘Skip the Inbox (Archive it)’ option, emails that match your settings will be automatically archived without you needing to do anything.
These simple to use archive settings allow you to customise the way that you use Gmail’s handy archive feature.
How Many Emails Can You Archive?
If you’re a high traffic email user, you may be worried about storage space for your archived emails, but there is no need, as they remain on the gmail server and still count toward your available space. Google doesn’t have a specific limit on the number of emails that you can archive, but it does cap the amount of storage space available to you for each account you have. This total amount of storage is shared across Gmail, Google Drive and Google Photos, including Gmail messages and attachments, Drive files, and photos and videos stored in Google Photos.
A standard personal Google Account currently includes up to 15 GB of storage shared across Gmail, Google Drive and Google Photos, so if you are a heavy user in any of these areas, you will likely reach the free storage limit quicker than others with lower use volumes. So, whilst we can’t give you a definitive number of how many emails you can archive, because it entirely depends on how you use your storage allocation across Google services, we can say that if you have a very large number of archived emails – it will use up more of your storage space than if you had deleted them and emptied the Bin within Gmail regularly. If you tend to keep archived emails – set a reminder to review them every now and again. You may find some are no longer needed and can delete archived messages, which will free up some valuable free storage space for other things that you do want to keep.
Is Automatic Archiving Automatic?
Like the sound of automatic email archiving? If so, you might wonder if it’s set up automatically when you create a Gmail email account. Every Gmail account includes the archive feature, which you can use manually or trigger through filters to remove messages from your inbox while keeping them available in All Mail for later access.
You can also manually archive a message by using the archive button in the toolbar for any given email, which is marked with a down arrow-style icon, or by using the handy keyboard shortcut ‘E’ when the message is open on screen. From the message list, you can also select multiple messages and click archive at once. This action will take the email from the inbox and make it available using the ‘all mail’ label view that we outlined above.
Is It Better To Archive Or Delete Emails?
Some people struggle to understand the difference between archiving and deleting emails but regardless of your understanding, whether you choose to archive or delete is down to personal preference. If you want to be able to recall emails in the future but don’t want them clogging up your inbox, then archiving is a great way to do this.
Many people archive Gmail messages when they may need the original message later. Consider doing this for important transactions, legal conversations or order warranties you may need to call upon. If you know that you will never need to read the email again – spam, newsletters, or very short replies for example, deleting the email is a safe and handy option.
Deleting an email means it will be removed from your inbox, won’t be archived and instead moved to the Bin. Unlike archived mail, which can still be found later, anything left in the Bin will eventually be permanently erased. Gmail automatically deletes messages that have been in the Bin for 30 days. After this point, the email will be gone permanently. Until that point, you will be able to restore it from the Bin. Archived emails remain in your account until you delete them, while messages in the Gmail Bin are automatically deleted after 30 days rather than staying there for a user-selected retention period.
Finding Your Gmail Archive: Final Thoughts
You should now have a good understanding of the Gmail archive function including how to find your Gmail archive, what it can be used for, and how to customise the archiving settings to suit your email use and preference. To recap, if you’ve ever noticed that emails you’ve read, replied to or forwarded are automatically archived, you can easily find archived emails again by using the ‘all mail’ label in the left hand menu of your Gmail inbox, because Gmail removes the inbox label rather than sending messages to a separate archive folder. Gmail’s search bar from here allows you to locate the emails you are looking for by searching for keywords or sender names, or surface only archived emails with search operators if needed.
