If you use Gmail for your emails, you no doubt archive some emails in Gmail from time to time. But if you ever want to go back and look at all those archived emails, the process isn’t actually as simple as you might think.
Sure, you can find emails that you’ve archived by looking in the “All Mail” folder, but that will just show you every email in your Gmail account including emails that are in your inbox, sent folder, drafts, etc.
But luckily, there is actually a way to see only your archived emails in Gmail, and in this article, that’s exactly what I’m going to show you how to do.
First, I’ll show you how to find your emails in “All Mail” in case you don’t already know how. And after that, I’ll show you a special method I discovered that allows you to see only your archived emails in Gmail (click here to skip straight down to that).
Prefer to watch a video about how to find archived emails in Gmail? Click here.
Finding Archived Emails In The All Mail Folder In Gmail
If you just want to see all your emails in Gmail including your archived emails, all you have to do is click on “More” in the left hand side menu.
And then all your hidden folders will appear underneath it, and all you’ll need to do is scroll down and click on “All Mail”.
Now, you’ll see all the emails that you have in Gmail. So your archived emails will be here, but so will all your emails from inbox, sent, drafts, and any other label you’ve created.
So this is fine and it will allow you to see your archived emails, but if you want to see only your archived emails, you’ll want to follow these next steps.
How To Find Only Your Archived Emails In Gmail
To see only your archived emails in Gmail, you’ll need to go into the “All Mail” folder (see steps above if you don’t know how), and then you’ll need to add some filters into the search box to filter out all the other emails.
So click in the search box at the top of the screen…
And then type -in:inbox -in:sent -in:drafts as shown in the screenshot below:
This will mean the “All Mail” folder will now show all your emails except for emails that are in your inbox, sent, or draft folders.
And now, as long as you don’t have any of your own custom folders, you could press enter and you would only see your archived emails because any emails from your inbox, sent, or drafts will be filtered out.
But, if you have other folders or labels (for example, I have two called “Cool” and “Cool Lable”), you’ll need to add those to the search as well by typing -in:folder name after everything that’s already in the search box.
So for example, because I have two of my own folders named “Cool” and “Cool Lable”, I will have to type -in:inbox -in:sent -in:drafts -in:cool -in:cool label into the search box as shown in the screenshot below:
Once you’ve entered all your folders into the search box like this, just press enter and you will now see only your archived emails!
And that’s all there is to it! Now you have a list of only the emails you have archived and none of the other emails.
It’s a bit annoying that you have to do this rather strange process just to see only your archived emails, but it does work fairly well, and once you know how to do it it doesn’t really take that long.
