Gmail is by far the most popular email service out there; it’s also fast, feature-rich, packs impressive spam protection, and gives you access to generous storage space. However, as all of us receive tons of emails every day, our Gmail inbox can quickly become overwhelming. Fortunately, Gmail offers a handy feature called email archiving that allows you to clean up and declutter your inbox without actually deleting emails; your archived emails are safely stored out of view.
However, unlike other services, such as Outlook and Yahoo Mail, Gmail doesn’t feature a folder called Archive, which you can access to view your archived emails. Instead, Gmail simply removes the archived items from your inbox while leaving them untouched in the “All Mail” folder. So, when you want to access any email that you’ve archived, you have to rely on alternate methods, such as Gmail search and navigating the “All Mail” folder. How do these methods work on the Gmail app on iPhone? Let’s find out.
Looking for archived emails on Gmail for iPhone
Gmail’s official iPhone app has pretty much the same feature set as Gmail on other platforms; as a result, there is no Archive folder on iOS either. So, the quickest way to find an archived email on iPhone is to use Gmail’s built-in search function. Thanks to its Google pedigree, Gmail has an excellent search, which is only getting better with AI.
Simply put what you remember about the email in the app’s search bar and tap “Search” on the iPhone keyboard to find it. The app also includes various search filters, such as label, from, to, and attachment, that you can use to refine the results. Alternatively, you can navigate to the “All Mail” folder in the app’s menu to view all Gmail conversations, including archived emails. However, if you had archived the email you’re trying to find weeks or months ago, you may have to go through dozens of pages of emails, making the process pretty cumbersome. So, it’s best to use the previously mentioned search feature. With a little creative searching, you can find exactly what you want.