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In this Itechguide, Victor teaches you how to find archived emails in Gmail. The guide covers steps to find archived emails in Gmail on Gmail.com, iPhone, or Android.
When you Archive an email in Gmail, it does not move to any label (folder). This makes finding archived emails a bit tricky. The steps in this Itechguide provide a walk-around.
Option 1: Find Archived Emails from a PC Browser
- Open Gmail.com from a browser on your PC or Mac. Then, scroll down the left pane and click All Mail.
- If the All Mail label is not displayed, scroll down and click the More label, then beneath the More label, click All Mail – see the second image below.
The All Mails label displays all emails – both Inbox and archived messages.
- To find an archived message, scroll through messages on the right pane of the All Mails label.
I understand that this is not a very efficient method to find old archived messages but it is the only available option for now. You can use search to reduce the number of displayed emails. But before I show you how to do that, let me show you to to identify archived messages within the All Mail label.
- The easiest way to identify an archived message is that archived messages DO NOT display “Inbox” (or any label) beside it. In the image below, the highlighted messages are archived – notice that unlike other messages, these 2 do not have “Inbox” beside them.
If an unarchived message is not currently on the Inbox label, it will display its current label location. What is important is that achieved messages DO NOT display any labels.
- To move an archived email back to the Inbox label (folder), right-click the message. Then, click Move to Inbox. However, if you right-click an email that is NOT archived, the Move to Inbox option will not be available – see the second image below.
- If you are finding it difficult locating the email you are looking for, you can use search to reduce the number of displayed emails in the All Mails label.
To search, you need to have some information about the email – the subject, or texts in the email. You may also use the date filter to search for a date range.
- To filter messages with Gmail search, click the drop-down beside the search box. The search options willl be displayed.
- On the search options, enter your search criteria and click Search. In this example, I want to return messages containing the word “find”, in the All Mail label within the last 1 week.
You can also filter your search by From, To, Subject, messages with attachments and more.
- The result returns only the messages that meet the criteria.
Option 2: Find Archived Emails from iPhone or Android
- Open the Gmail app on your smartphone.
- Then, on the top left of the app, tap the app’s menu icon (3 horizontal lines).
- Scroll down the displayed menu options and tap the All mail label. On the iPhone app, the label is called All emails – see the second image below.
All email messages will be displayed – including Inbox and Archived messaged. An archived message will NOT have “Inbox” beside it but any message that is NOT yet archived will display “Inbox” or the current label the message is stored in.
- To move an archived message back to the Inbox, tap and hold the message until more options are displayed on top of the app.
- Then, from the displayed options, tap the menu icon on the top right. When you tap this icon, more options will be displayed.
Another way to differentiate an archived from a non-archived message is that when you tap and hold, an archived message will NOT display the Archive icon but a non-archived message will display the Archive icon – compare the 2 images below. In the second image, the Archive icon is highlighted.
- From the options displayed when you tapped the 3 dots on the top right, tap Move to Inbox.
The final options displayed by a non-archived message will NOT have the Move to Inbox option – see the second image below.
You can use the 2 methods covered in this Itechguide to find archived emails in Gmail! I hope you found this Itechguide helpful. If you found it helpful, click on “Yes” beside the “Was this page helpful” question below.
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