How to Automatically Archive Emails in Gmail

This article will show you how to archive your emails in Gmail automatically. 

Why Archive?

Archiving an email will allow you to retain a copy without cluttering your inbox. Archiving doesn't delete your emails. It simply removes them from your inbox and puts them in your "All Mail" folder. In the future, if you need information from the email, you can simply search for it in Gmail and find it.

So how do we do it? 

1. Open Gmail.

2. In the search field, enter the following: label:inbox older_than:30d

This will filter any messages that are in your inbox and are older than 30 days and only display those that meet the criteria. You can change the time range by using different variables:

d = days

m = months

y = years

label:inbox older_than:6m = "Show all emails in the inbox older than 6 months."

label:inbox older_than:1y = "Show all emails in the inbox older then 1 year"

You can also change the label portion of the filter as well, for example:

label:sent older_than:6m = "Show all emails in the in the sent folder, older then 6 months"

This even works for any custom labels you have made; just make sure to match the exact spelling and capitalization. For example, I have the label "CDW" for emails from that vendor. So I can simply put label:CDW older_than:6m.

3. Click the "Show search options" icon in the search box:

4. Next, select "Create Filter"

5. You will receive a warning; you can disregard the warning for our purposes; just press OK:

6. Next, you will see the following window. Select "Skip the Inbox (Archive it)" as well as "Also apply filter to matching conversations"

7. Click "Create filter," and you're done! This will run the filter on any existing message more than 30 days old and create the rule for when any more recent emails become more than 30 days old.