Instead of outright deleting less important emails in Gmail, many users choose to archive them and thus remove them from Inbox. They are still there and you can find them under All Mail. However, since Gmail doesn’t have a dedicated Archive label or folder, all archived emails are not grouped, which means that you’ll need to find them manually. If you want to retrieve archived emails from Gmail, check the instructions we provided below.
Where to find archived emails in Gmail?
Sadly, unlike Outlook, Gmail doesn’t have an Archived folder (or label) where you can find all emails that you archived over the years. All those emails are still available in All Mail but moved out of the Inbox and other categories and labels. So, you can still find them and unarchive them if necessary.
And it’s fairly simple if you know the exact subject, recipient/sender, or even email content and or approximate size. You can just select All Mail from the side pane and then search by a keyword or by including different filters. Here’s how to unarchive an email on Gmail for the web or Gmail on Android/iOS:
- Once you open Gmail, select All Mail from the side pane. Tap on the hamburger menu to expand it in the app.
- In the search bar, type the keyword or select filters to find the archived email.
- Check the box next to the email or tap to highlight it.
- Click on the Move to Inbox icon in the toolbar or tap on the 3-dots menu and select Move to Inbox there.
Of course, you can also unarchive all conversations you’ve archived en masse, too. For this, you’ll need to use Gmail for the web on your PC. Or you can enable Desktop mode on a mobile browser. Once you select All Mail from the side pane, check the box in the toolbar to select all emails. You’ll get a prompt to select All conversations so you can select it. Have in mind that this can mean thousands of emails if you never tidied up your account.
After that, just click on the Move to Inbox icon in the toolbar and all archived emails will get back to Inbox. A simpler way to deal with emails you don’t want to delete and keep an uncluttered Inbox is to create additional labels in Gmail and just move them there.
With that said, we can conclude this article. Thank you for reading and don’t forget to share your thoughts in the comments section below. We look forward to hearing from you.
