Auto Archive Email: How to Successfully Manage Your Inbox

Having a full email inbox is not the worst thing that can happen to you, but it can certainly cause many complications when you miss an important email or have to spend hours deleting all those emails.

If you’re using Gmail for Mac, you’re processing email faster than in the browser, but with a Gmail feature called auto archive email Gmail will move your older messages to an archive for you. This feature makes it easy for you to maintain your inbox with auto archiving process on specific types of your emails, such as newsletters and notifications.

Many of your emails are probably disposable, but you might want to keep some of them if you may need them later. Instead of deleting email after an email, and not be able to access them any more, you can simply archive them.

Once your email is placed in the Gmail archive, it’s removed from the inbox and tagged with “All Mail” label. These emails will remain in your Gmail account, and you can easily retrieve them when you need them. To make the most of this often forgotten feature, we bring you steps on how to auto archive your emails.

Creating an Auto Archive Label

Let’s be honest, you’re not going to save time if you have to manually archive the majority of your emails. As much as it’s great to have an archive, the manual process takes time. Doing it automatically, on the other hand, will save you a lot of time and energy.

So, we’re going to tech you how to automatically keep your inbox clean. Bonus tip: use this 30% discount to get the best Gmail client for Mac and do all of this even faster.

Steps to Creating Auto Archive Label

Here’s what you have to do to create your own auto archive Gmail label:

  1. Go to Gmail Settings.
  2. Find the Label tab and click on it.
  3. Press “Create New Label” button.
  4. Name it “auto-archive.”
Creating a label in Boxy Suite

It’s as simple as that! There are no algorithms you have to insert to manage your emails in a carefree way. So, not only will your automatically archiving process be effortless, but setting it up will also take less than a minute of your time. You can use Gmail label for various other hacks as well.

Gmail Filters

For instance, If you want each information you receive from LinkedIn to be archived automatically after two days, you can simply create a Gmail filter that will apply auto archive label to these LinkedIn notifications. All you have to do is follow these simple steps:

  1. Open any email you received from LinkedIn.
  2. Click on “More” in the top bar.
  3. Click on “Filter Messages :ike These.”
  4. Click on “Create Filter With This Search.”
  5. Tick the “Apply the Label” box and choose the auto-archived label.
  6. At the bottom of the form, tick the box “Also Apply to Matching Conversations.”
  7. Click on the “Create Filter” button.

These steps can be repeated any time you decide to auto archive email as well e.g. Quora digest, Spotify notifications, WordPress comments, etc.

Why You Need Archiving

You’ve probably never even thought about archiving, not to mention auto archiving, until now. We all tend to ignore this great Gmail feature until our inbox is full because we don’t want to delete emails just in case we need them.

Don’t worry, it happens to all of us! But, ignoring all these numerous benefits of archiving your emails will do you more damage than just having a full inbox. So, let’s start by explaining why you need auto archiving at all.

Archive vs. Delete

Not be able to retrieve an important email you received two months ago just because you deleted it by accident is a terrible feeling. All this panicking can easily be avoided if you start archiving your emails instead of deleting them.

Those emails which ended in the “Trash” folder will be automatically deleted after 30 days, while everything you decide to auto archive will stay in your Gmail account until you manually remove it.

Searchability

Let’s go back to that moment of panic when you’re searching for an email, and you can’t find it. The thing you will love about auto-archiving emails is that these emails are included in your search as well. After all, Gmail is a truly robust search engine, you just need to know how to utilize it.

So, if you decide to auto archive an email, you will immediately find it once you start searching for it. Also, you can exclude your archived emails just by typing “in:inbox” and adding the search term.

Another great thing about auto archiving is that you archived email will not be marked as read automatically. If your email gets automatically archived as you created an auto archive label for it, your email will stay unread until you open it or decide to take another action with it.

Archive vs. “Mark as Read”

You might think that clicking on that “Mark as Read” button will help you stay organized and up to date with everything that’s going on in your inbox, but do you really need all these emails sitting there? With an option to auto archive some of these emails, it will involve a lot less of your engagement.

Archiving Old Emails

Well, now that you’re aware of how many hours you could have saved with auto-archiving, it’s time to upgrade your entire Gmail game. If you take a quick look into your inbox, you will probably find some of the emails received a year ago that need to be managed.

Also check out our guide on how to delete old Gmail emails.

Steps to Auto Archiving Old Emails

As we completely understand why you’ve been postponing organization of your old emails, we strongly recommend creating a quick filter for them which will lead to a successful auto archiving. Here’s how you can auto archive your old emails in Gmail inbox:

  1. Type “in:inbox before:yyyy/mm/dd” in the search bar and replace it with yesterday’s date or any other form when you want to archive your emails.
  2. Click the drop-down icon and then press “Create Filter With This Search.”
  3. Confirm with clicking “OK” in the pop-up window “Confirm Creating Filter.”
  4. Tick the box “Skip the Inbox” and “Also Apply Filter to Matching Conversations.”
  5. If you want to mark all your emails as read, tick the “Mark as Read” box as well.
  6. Click “Create Filter.”

Post-archiving Old Emails

Depending on the number of your old emails, it will take some time to auto archive it. Once it’s done, all of your chosen emails will disappear from your inbox and be safely archived. But, if you choose all the emails in your inbox (‘in:inbox’), you will need to delete the created filter if you don’t want to all of your upcoming emails to end up in your “Archive” folder instead of your inbox.

If you want to delete this filter, you will need to click on the Cog wheel icon, choose Settings and then Filters and Blocked Addresses. There, you will find the filter you created and delete it immediately.

Final Thoughts

In today’s fully digitized world, inbox management is crucial for every type of business and personal needs. Drowning in endless emails, both relevant and irrelevant, will only make you feel frustrated, and you might even lose motivation to work on your other assignments. Hence, auto archiving email!

Not to mention that poor inbox management could also lead to missing out on vital information for your business, which could lead to more serious consequences. Auto archiving is also very handy while you’re on vacation and want to avoid reading hundreds of emails on your first day back in the office.

As we already said, the benefits of auto-archiving emails are truly numerous. It will take only a minute of your time, but it will save you so many hours in the future. With such a powerful platform like Gmail, it would be a real pity not to explore all of the options of auto-archiving.

One comment

  1. This is great information! I’m still wondering how to do it where an email is automatically archived “after two days” instead of immediately. And why do I want to label the email if I’m just going to archive it with a filter? I’m reading and re-reading and I’m a little stuck on those points but I’m headed in the right direction after this.

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