It’s been decades, but archiving emails in Gmail still sucks

My Gmail email philosophy is simple: keep all emails in the All Mail folder for the rest of time. However, Gmail includes several organizational tools that allow you to fully control your mailbox, from custom rules to labels, filters, and its new AI smarts. One management action that has stood the test of time is Archive.

This little tool is just a horizontal swipe on an email away, immediately removing it from the Inbox and stuffing it out of view. This, in a sense, is a helpful option. It pushes users towards that revered inbox zero, but it’s terribly ineffective if you look at it critically.

Even though archiving is as old as Gmail, it has been broken for over a decade. Let me explain.

First, to understand the problem, I must explain how Gmail handles your array of emails.

Every email stored in Gmail is located within the All Mail location. Everything else, including your Inbox, is not a folder or physical location but a label. This virtual filing cabinet method is a great way to organize mail. It’s much like a physical ring binder that hosts every leaf of paper, but differentiated by sleeves and colorful dividers.

With everything present in a single place, you can effectively categorize, tag, and filter mail using custom rules and search filters. In theory, this lets you find every email you’ve ever received, but this methodology has problems, especially regarding Gmail’s superficial archival method.

When you archive an email in Gmail, it doesn’t put it in a special archival location within Gmail. Instead, it strips the Inbox tag from the mail, removing it from the app’s most-trafficked mail label, and returns it to All Mail with no label. On the surface, this is a good thing. It removes that email from immediate view but keeps it stored in your account. However, if you don’t give this email a custom tag before archiving it, it’ll become challenging to find that specific email again.

Importantly, unlike unread mails, Gmail doesn’t specifically highlight archived mails as archived. Therefore, remembering specific details about an email or searching for emails without labels is the only reliable way to seek these out. Sure, I might be able to retrieve the coffee shop-related email I archived earlier today. However, if you archive thousands of unlabeled emails across several months, finding that one you were sent a year ago suddenly becomes a near-impossible task.

Gmail’s concept of archival goes against the definition of the process. Essentially, archiving involves collecting items for long-term storage, but, and extremely importantly, cataloging is a core tenet of the process. Gmail doesn’t automatically categorize or even label archived mail. So, in short, archiving emails doesn’t clean up your Gmail account; it merely makes emails more difficult to retrieve.

So, why do I have a problem with Gmail’s archiving system when I don’t explicitly use the feature? Well, here’s where we stumbled into a little problem caused by the confluence of two Android features. Like many other Android users, I swipe left from the right edge of my screen to go back. Incidentally, swiping horizontally in either direction on an email in Gmail archives that email. Naturally, this leads to many, many accidentally shadow-realmed emails.

However, this problem extends to other Gmail app and web interface areas, even for those who may actively use the feature. There is no easy way to find archived emails. You can use the search string has:nouserlabels -in:inbox in Gmail’s search bar to bring up unlabeled archived emails, but this is something I expect few to remember, let alone use regularly.

This may seem like a problem that can only be resolved by Google revising how it stores emails. Perhaps setting up a physical archive folder alongside All Mails would simplify this process. Well, yes, but there’s a far simpler and more immediate solution.

Archived emails should be automatically labeled and accessible through an Archive shortcut on the Gmail app and the web interface’s sidebars. It really is that simple. This would allow users to shed emails from the Inbox label and provide a direct line to archived emails if the need should ever arise — all without requiring search operators.

Additionally, I would appreciate greater control over the swipe-to-archive action. While you can change what the swipe actions do, the options are pretty limited. I’d quite like the ability to change this gesture to star or apply a custom label to emails. I’m sure several power users would like this, too.

I can’t fathom why Google has ignored Gmail’s archiving system for so long. Most of its rivals, including Microsoft Outlook, Yahoo Mail, Proton Mail, and Apple Mail, offer far more approachable ways to access archived emails. Ultimately, this problem is as old as Gmail, so I’d much sooner trust pigs to fly than Google to remedy it.