Archive Or Delete: How To Unclutter Your Gmail Inbox

If I had to pick one most necessary communication tool when it comes to work, I would name my Gmail without a slightest hesitation. And I am sure I would find a number of others sharing my opinion. Gmail has become an indispenible tool in our everyday lives. We get more emails than ever, check our inboxes regularly and yet tend to be surprised when we see all the accumulated clutter.

Thankfully, Gmail does offer numerous ways to keep your mail organized: folders, tabs, tags and more. But if you don’t want to spend hours grouping your emails, there are two more effective and perhaps radical solutions: deleting and archiving.

So what’s the deal with these two and how can you use them to efficiently manage your mail?

Archiving: Save It For Later

By archiving an email you will place it outside your inbox, and yet it will be accessible should you ever want to get back to it.

Archiving works best for emails that contain the information you might want to return to (like email addresses, addresses, account numbers and so on) and yet you don’t see the point of them being in your Inbox.

To archive an email on your Android all you have to do is swipe the selected email away to the left while looking through the contents of your Inbox. This is easy, quick and convenient but holds a hidden danger of archiving your emails by accident (which has happened to me more than once.) Surely, Gmail allows you to undo this – and there will be the “undo” button hovering on the spot for some time. But if you happen to do it by accident quite often, it can get annoying. For that, you can go to Gmail settings and turn this feature off altogether. Go to navigation drawer>Settings>General Settings and turn off “swipe to archive” option.

(If you archive an email, you will no longer have to see it sitting in your inbox but will also have the peace of mind knowing that if you need to, a quick search will bring it back to you.)

Another way to do that is to open the email in question. Upon going through the contents you will be presented with a few options. See a small box with a downward arrow? This is the archive button.

Now you can access all your archived emails in the “All Mail” folder and if you need to quickly access a recently archived email, it will be at the top of the list.

 Deleting: When It’s Really Over

When you delete an email, quite naturally, it goes to the Trash Folder. As Gmail will not get rid of the deleted email right away, some of us have come to rely on it as a storage for unwanted emails, which you still want accessible. However, a trash bin as a trash bin and the Gmail garbage truck will come in 30 days to completely erase your email from the system. Keep that in mind and switch to archiving if you may want to see that email again.

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