How does archiving work in gmail?
It’s quite simple but it’s important to mention a few things about Gmail’s special folder structure.
Since there is no dedicated archive folder, the messages are simply stripped of the “Inbox” label and kept in the special folder.
Basically, it’s like putting color-coded post-it notes on a document, you can place any label on any message without moving the message itself between folders. Just like you can move color-coded post-it notes between pages without changing the page order in the document
So where do archived messages go, how to access Gmail Archive folder and what does archiving of messages do to your Inbox?
Instead of the dedicated “Archive” folder, you can find all archived messages in the “All Mail” folder and you can distinguish archived messages from other messages by the lack of the label like: “Inbox”, “Work”, “Personal”, etc. So if you need to look at the archived messages, you don’t have to look for the special folder, they’re all in “All Mail”.
Without any of these labels the message is considered to be in archive and in the next paragraph we’ll take a look at how to retrieve archive Gmail messages.
I archived my messages, how do I get them back in inbox?
Now that we have a better understanding of where archived messages are hiding, you are probably thinking- how do I get them back in my inbox? In eM Client it’s easy, just drag the message from “All Mail” and drop it in Gmail “Inbox” folder or use right-click > Move to folder…
Or assign the "Inbox" label back!
What if I don’t want to use gmail archive?
There's a solution even for that. Aside from the Gmail archive feature you can use eM Client’s built-in archive solution. While Gmail is keeping all messages in “All Mail” folder on the server, eM Client allows you to store archived messages locally in so-called “Local Folders”.
Local archive provides search results faster than searching for messages on the server, it can help you free up some space in your mailbox and it can help with indexing and more efficient searching since you’re searching only archived messages, not all the contents of “All Mail” folder. It’s definitely worth mentioning that it can archive all messages in accounts that have been specified in “Account Preferences” so it can be used with any email account, including Gmail.
To set up Automatic Archiving go to Menu > Settings > Mail >Automatic Archiving, tick “Enable automatic archiving” and configure the rest of the parameters to your liking.