Google Mail provides an option to archive email messages and there is a toolbar button to archive the currently selected message. What happens to emails you archive? Where do they go?
Where do archived emails disappear to once you click the Archive button in the Gmail toolbar. Are they deleted, moved, hidden? And how do you get them back again if you change your mind? How do you unarchive email messages in other words, and return them to the inbox where they originally were?
How Gmail labels work
What you have to understand when using Gmail is that it makes use of labels. A label is a bit like a keyword or tag and one or more labels can be attached to an email.
Imagine you had a collection of photographs and a photo manager program. You could add keywords or tags to your photos to organize them. For example, all photos taken on a particular holiday or trip, all photos of landscapes, photos with a particular person or images of your dog. You could then select a keyword and filter the photos so that only those with that keyword are displayed.
Gmail works in a similar way and it displays email messages that contain a particular label. When the Inbox is selected in the sidebar, the messages are filtered so that only those with the Inbox label associated with them are shown.
Some labels are built into Gmail, but you can also create your own labels and assign them to messages, such as Work, Personal, Family or whatever. If you delete an email, the Bin label is added to it and the Inbox label is removed.
Select a label in the left panel and you see only those messages with that label. Select Inbox and emails with the Inbox label are shown.
Archive emails
What the Archive button does is to remove the Inbox label. If an email does not have an Inbox label, you won’t see it when the Inbox is selected.
- Archiving an email does not delete it or move it
- Archiving an email removes the system labels so you won’t see it in Inbox, Important, Sent Mail and so on
- Archiving an email does not remove labels you have added yourself
If you create a label called Work, and add the Work label to an email in the Inbox, then archive it, only the Inbox label is removed. Your Work label is still attached. This means that you could select the Work label on the left and the archived email would be displayed. It would not be visible in the inbox though.
View archived emails
If an archived email has no user-created labels, it cannot be viewed by selecting labels in the sidebar. To view archived emails, click the More link at the bottom of the sidebar.
Select All Mail in the sidebar and every email message is displayed whether it has labels or not. Archived emails are displayed here, along with every other email. (The Bin and Sent are exceptions.)
Why archive emails?
The archive function is for hiding emails you don’t want to see in the inbox, but you don’t want to delete. It is for clearing the clutter from your inbox and it enables you to deal with messages and then remove them.
Archived messages can can be viewed by selecting All Mail on the left or by using the search box at the top of the page - they still appear in searches.
Unarchive an email in Gmail
Suppose you archived an email, but you change your mind and want it back in the inbox. How do you do that?
- Go to More in the sidebar
- Select All mail in the sidebar
- Find and open the email
- Click the toolbar button to move it to the inbox
I use All Mail all the time. Its the easiest way to quickly check received and sent mails. Specially if you have a dozen emails everyday, and give been using Gmail for many years now, have a long list of labels…
Thanks for the clear, concise and easy to follow explanation, with excellent examples, of a non-intuitive system. A big help for a novice techie like me.
So glad I made the switch to Gmail!
Managing excessive emails couldn’t be easier,
thanks for elucidating it all for me