Gmail: There is no archive

Time to put your understanding of Gmail onto its head, especially if you’re new to it and coming from a different email system. Let’s dive right in.

Gmail is a database

Your inbox floating above the archive

Gmail is a database, meaning you have a mass of emails and can search and organize them in different ways. Unlike in Outlook or Notes, where you can shift discreet documents around, Gmail uses a big pool of emails that you can tag or categorize. This metaphor is key to understanding how Gmail works — abandon all thought about folders and buckets.

Emails never move. Instead of putting emails into folders, you are labeling them differently.

Gmail is a big pool of emails. You can categorize the emails in different ways — they never change place.

There is no place called “inbox”

I’m shocked, Morpheus. Shocked.

Since Gmail is a sea of emails (bonus points if you are calling it your corpus of emails), how can there be an inbox? There can’t. But … if you don’t have an inbox, what is permanently overflowing and eating your time?

Your inbox is a filter, a view. When a new email arrives, it is stored along with your emails, but Gmail sticks the label “inbox” onto it so you can find it easier. I’ll show you what it looks like in a bit. It’s important to notice that incoming emails are in no special place, they are merely marked as “inbox”.

Just as the inbox is a clever illusion, so are your folders.

What then is “the archive”?

“Archive” is a verb, not a place

Was that necessary, Google?

For many of us, an archive is a separate place where content gets stored permanently. What goes in the archive tends to get forgotten. It is a place apart from the work desk, the day-to-day work.

Such a place exists in Outlook and in Notes, in the form of a separate “mail file”. You can pack old email into archives, store them somewhere else and access when needed. Gmail doesn’t work like that — there is no way to create a separate backup. It’s all one.

Instead, Gmail has a place called “all mail” that you can visit. It contains — surprise — all mail, like an X-ray through your email life. Everything you have sent, everything you have received, everything you have put a label on (remember, they aren’t folders).

The only thing you will not see in “all mail” is spam and trash — that breaks the metaphor, but Google is just so allergic to spam that they consider it dead. Both will be gone within 30 days, so Google spares you their sight. This is another reason to never delete email.

Archive in Gmail is not a place, but a verb. It means “remove the inbox label”. There is even an opposite, called “Move to inbox”. That’s better, but also a misnomer, because the email does not get moved. The action should be called “hide from inbox” and “show in inbox” — or even better, “Done”. That’s what Google Inbox called it.

“Done” implies that you should file away the email after you read it, telling you how to work. Perhaps that is why Gmail hasn’t kept the name — it tries to allow you any working style.

Hardcore examples

Let’s look at “All mail” to see it all come to light:

1. This email is in the inbox. When you are in any view but the inbox, the “inbox” label is revealed.
2. This email is in the inbox, too (it’s got the label!). When you opened your inbox on this account, you would see emails 1+2, nothing else. This email also has the label “Projects/ProjectX” — to illustrate that labels are not folders.
3. This email is both in “Projects” and in the sub-label “ProjectX”. That is perfectly possible, because — Gmail uses labels, not folders.
4. This email is both in “Project X” and “Project Y”. This fact should not shock you at this point.
5. This email is starred. If you now think that starring and labelling are very similar, you are right.
6. This email has been auto-labeled as “Promotions”. Other message categories are “social”, “updates” and “forums”. I don’t use them.

Bonus!

Now that you have good metaphors for Gmail, you might be happy to know they apply to other G Suite services, too:

• Contacts are not gathered in “groups”, those have recently been renamed to “labels”. Sounds familiar?
• Drive documents are not really stored in folders, they just appear that way. Drive’s folders are objects that have a relationship with files — the interface displays them hierarchically. But the “folder” metaphor we are used to breaks down with lesser-known features of Drive, such that files may have no folder at all, or several folders at the same time.

I hope this gives you the confidence to archive fearlessly. If you are confident in Gmail’s search, it should also free you from the need to create folders. Thanks for reading, and onward into an easier future with better metaphors!

PS: If you work at PwC, visit and follow this blog at The Last Stop!