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 How to delete archived emails in Gmail want to see in your inbox for now by simply selecting them and then clicking on archive button as shown in below screenshot.

3. Select all required emails and click on Archive to archive them

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.

. Archive selective Gmail emails using filters

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).

6. Create a Gmail filter to archive emails

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.

7. Select existing conversations too if you want to 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.

delete archived emails in gmail

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19 thoughts on “How to find archived emails in gmail?”

BOBSEPTEMBER 21, 2021 AT 10:20 AM

The archive “feature” was in no way thoughtfully implemented by Google engineers are you assert. This is the most inconvenient and unhelpful “feature” I’ve come across in my 30 years in IT. Let me start by pointing out that archiving is configured by default for swiping left or right in the Android app. There is no prompt asking if that’s what you really want to do. It just does it by default… And there’s literally no way to find those archived emails again. Unless, that is, you’re Rain Man and have a solid photographic memory of every email that’s EVER come into your inbox and can identify the messages you accidently swiped on. Again, this isn’t a convenient user-friendly feature meant to enhance the user experience.