If you have a lot of unread emails in gmail, there are two ways to manage them. you can delete the messages or send them to the archives. the second option is better as it helps you retrieve important emails later, even if you don’t want to read them right now.
Deleted messages are always easy to restore as they automatically go to the trash. however, archived emails do not go to the trash and are a bit more difficult to retrieve.
This article is a step-by-step guide on how to recover archived emails.
retrieve archived emails in gmail webmail
To archive an email in gmail, you can select multiple unread/read messages and send them to the archive as shown here. however, there is no real folder called “files” in gmail. still, you can always create labels and send the emails to one of the tagged folders.
once you send a number of emails to the archive area, you will receive an alert in the webmail window. you can undo your action at this point if you wish.
go to the side panel and select “more” to locate a folder called “all mail”. once you click on it, you can see all the emails that were recently archived. As you can see, any recent email that doesn’t have the “inbox” tag is an archived email.
select the multiple archived emails you would like to see in your gmail inbox and click “move to inbox” as shown here. While this method will help you get your archived emails back, it is time-consuming to sort through a maze of other emails in your inbox, sent, drafts, and other folders. therefore, in the next section we will learn how you can neatly classify all the archived emails for further activities.
how to see all emails archived together in gmail
To see all the archived emails together, go to “all emails”. here, it is possible to use a search operator mentioned in a gmail support ticket on this topic.
type the following search operator in the “all mail” search box. basically, it excludes all your messages in sent, inbox, draft and chat.
as soon as you type the search operator above, you will be able to see all your archived emails from the most recent date forward. now it’s easier to select them and move all emails to inbox or other folders.
retrieve archived emails in mobile gmail
Once you select emails in a gmail mobile app, you will see a similar archive button where all emails can be moved. in this case, two emails were moved to the archives.
To retrieve archived emails in a gmail mobile app, select the “all mails” folder in the side panel of your app window.
In the next step, you can see a list of archived emails that are different from emails marked with the “inbox” label. you can easily select them and move them to inbox or other folders.
the search operator code that separates archived emails from those in the inbox should also work in the mobile window search box.
conclusion
Along with labels, gmail’s archive feature is one of the best ways to clean up your inbox without accidentally deleting an important email. Since you can read these emails later, the archive button helps you avoid wasting time on low-priority messages.
did you find any other method to retrieve all archived emails at once? share your ideas in the comments.