What is the difference between archiving and deleting emails?

When it comes to managing and cleaning up email, there are two options that almost every email service these days has: “Archive” and “Detele”. It sounds strange but both Archive and Detele are essentially “deleting” emails from your inbox, So what’s the difference and which option should you use? Find out below.

What happens when you “Archive” an email?

In essence, an email that has been archived by you will not be deleted from your account. You can still find it like any other email in your inbox. However, archived emails will not show up in the “Inbox” section as usual.

Besides, they also won’t disappear forever after 30 days like emails that have been moved to the “Trash” folder, and can easily be restored back to the inbox when needed. Archived emails also still appear in search results.

Imagine traditional handwritten letters. The storage function is like when you put letters in a drawer to tidy up. You won’t find them cluttered on your desk anymore, but you can pull them out of a drawer and read them again anytime you want.

What happens when you “delete” an email?

Literally, deleting emails is a permanent function. When you delete one or more emails, that email is usually moved to the “Trash” folder. They will stay there for 30 days before completely disappearing from your account without being undone. But within those 30 days, you can restore any email from the trash to your inbox.

Note that deleted emails don’t show up in the “All messages” section, and you can’t find them using the search engine either.

Reminds me of handwritten letters. Deleting is like putting a message in the trash. A few days before trashing, you can still get those letters back. But after they follow the garbage truck to the dump, the chance for you to find it again is almost no longer there.

Should emails be archived or deleted?

This probably depends a lot on the actual condition of the email account you own. For example, if your account is “full” of available space, just store your email in case you need to use it again.

Conversely, if you want to optimize the storage of your gmail account, delete all unnecessary emails. Of course, it’s okay to archive useless spam emails, just delete them even if you don’t need to save space.

Since 2013, Google has consolidated all account data together and limited the free storage plan to 15GB. Your Gmail, Google Drive, and Google Photos inboxes all count towards that attribution. So, unless you want to pay for more storage, you should delete emails that are no longer needed to save space.