When I switched from Microsoft Outlook to Gmail, one of the first questions I had was about finding my archived emails in Gmail, because I could not find a label called archived emails.

So I did a bit of research and found out some interesting things Gmail do with archived emails.

So How to find archived emails in gmail?

Archived emails disappear from your Gmail Inbox and stay forever in All Mails label until you manually delete them. These archived emails can be easily found under "All Mails" label in Gmail. You can also use Gmail filters to easily find specific archived emails.

To find your archived emails, first click on "More" link in the left hand navigation of your Gmail as shown below (it works for both personal Gmail and Google Workspace subscription)

Here you will see a label called "All Mail", click on it to see all your emails including the ones you archived.

Use Gmail filter to find specific archived emails

Now you already know that you can go to All Mail label and find your archived emails there, but what if you want to find a specific email from someone that you archived?

You can use "in:all" filter which will show you all the emails including archived ones, You can also add more criteria to this filter to find specific archived emails.

For e.g If I want to find an archived email which was sent to me from Microsoft and had an attachment, I can use filter like

in:all from:microsoft.com has:attachment

It will show me all such emails as shown in the screenshot below.

How to find archived emails in Gmail on Android

To see archived emails on your Android device —> open your Gmail app —> click on the hamburger icon on top left, and then click on All Mail label.

Here you will see all archived emails as shown in the screenshot below.

Gmail Email Archiving Functionality

Email archiving functionality in Gmail is indeed very thoughtful work by Google, it would be helpful to understand how does gmail archive folder work so you can easily use it for your advantage.

I am sure you would like to keep your Gmail inbox as clean as possible, but we all get hundreds of email now a days, you can of course delete the emails that are of no value to you, but what about emails that are not relevant today, but might be in the future?

Thats where you can use Gmail's email archiving functionality, as soon as you archive an email, it disappears from your Inbox and goes to All Mail label. It helps keeping our Inbox clean without losing or deleting the email that we might need in the future.

Delete vs Archive Emails - When should you use them?

To understand when should you archive vs delete emails, you should first understand the fundamental differences between them.

Feature Default Behavior When you delete an email in Gmail, it goes to your Trash label. When you archive an email in Gmail, it essentially remove the inbox label from that email which makes it disappear from Inbox, and land in All Mail label. Email Retention Deleted Emails are retained in Trash label for 30 days, after 30 days they are deleted permanently and can not be recovered.

You have an option to manually empty your Trash label anytime which will delete those trashed emails permanently. Archived Emails are retained forever in your All Mails label unless you either manually select and delete them OR delete them automatically by creating a Gmail filter. Gmail filter to find You can use in:Trash filter to see all of your deleted emails. You can use in:all filter to view all archived emails (now essentially it includes all emails not just archived ones,

However, you can use other filter criteria to find specific archived email as shown above). Bulk Operation Yes, you can bulk delete either all or specific emails. Yes, you can bulk archive either all or specific emails.

Recommendation :
As Gmail offers enough storage to keep thousands of emails, I would recommend you to delete emails only when you are sure you won't need them in future. If you are dicy, then it's better to archive them.

Archive your Gmail emails with ease

You can archive the emails that you do not want to see in your inbox for now by simply selecting them and then clicking on archive button as shown in below screenshot.

You can also use search bar to archive specific emails (for e.g if I want to archive all emails which I got from AppSheet, I can use a filter like following and then select to archive these emails.

However, there might be scenarios where you do not want some specific emails to appear in your Inbox, rather should be archived straight away.

For e.g : I want email notifications from apps-scripts-notifications@google.com should be archived automatically. I can use Gmail filter for this as shown below.

1. I can put my criteria in Gmail filter to search for emails that I want to be automatically archived (in my case this criteria will be from:apps-scripts-notifications@google.com).

As shown in the screenshot below, you should :
1. Select the Inbox (Archive it).
2. Also select Also apply filter to xx matching conversations to archive existing emails that match my criteria.
3. Create a filter

Now all my future emails that match this criteria would be archived automatically without a need for me to manually select and archive them.

How to delete archived emails?

Finally, in case if you need to delete your archived emails, you can simply go to All Mail label, select the emails you want to delete, and then delete them by clicking the delete button in the menu bar as shown in the screenshot below.

You can also delete specific archived emails easily by using the Gmail filter.