How to Find Archived Emails in Gmail

With 9+ years in SEM and data automation, Piyush Nair helps businesses and individuals simplify processes using Google Sheets, Excel, Apps Script, and other productivity tools, turning data into actionable insights

How this article is generated : This article was written by a human author and AI is used in proofread.

This article explains how to find archived emails in Gmail and take action like restore, delete or move them into different labels.

Table of Content

Where Are Emails Stored After Archiving?
How to Access Archived emails in Gmail
How to Restore Archived emails in Gmail
How to Delete Archived emails in Gmail

Where Are Emails Stored After Archiving?

Gmail is a label-based email platform. Any action we take on emails results in them remaining in at least one label.

Gmail offers a primary label, “Inbox,” to help you focus on important emails. It moves archived emails to another label called “All Mail.”

Below screenshot gives an overview on how an archived and non archived email looks like

How to Access Archived emails in Gmail

When we mark an email as Archive it moves to “All Mails” folder. Unfortunately there is no direct method to access archived emails in Gmail. Hence I am going to give a very effective workaround for it.

Go to search bar in Gmail and type below syntax, In this we are directing Gmail to go to all emails “in:all” but exclude emails which are present in following labels Inbox, Sent, Drafts, Chats, Spam, Trash

in:all -label:inbox -label:sent -label:drafts -label:chats -label:spam -label:trash

Keep in mind, the concept is that archived emails don’t appear under any label except “All Mail,” so we need to exclude all other labels

How to Restore Archived emails in Gmail

After you filter the emails, select the ones you want to restore

Then you can click on “Move to Inbox” button as shown in the below screenshot

It will move all the selected emails to your Inbox

If you want to move emails to a specific label, simply click on the options provided below

How to Delete Archived emails in Gmail

After filtering the emails, you can select the ones you want to delete

Click the delete button to move all selected emails to the Trash label. Remember, Gmail automatically deletes emails in the Trash after 30 days.

Conclusion

Using above syntax you can easily filter out the archived emails in Gmail. Once you try it you will observe that we perform lot more operations using syntax filters. Hope you like the post.