30 in 30: Day 9 - Gmail: Archive vs Delete

Day 9 in the 30 in 30 series will start a week of posts dedicated to Gmail.  Good, bad or indifferent, this tool has taken over as the #1 form of communication. Today I am going to take a look at the difference between deleting vs archiving in Gmail.  A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away we used to be limited by storage.  Massive hard drives were expensive and space was at a premium.  You couldn't keep things forever, especially those emails with photos or videos attached.  They would really take away from how many emails that you could save over time and how long you could keep emails stored.  But luckily for us, we are living in the age of Google, where storage is unlimited (for educational domains) and everything is backed up to the Cloud.  For me, this meant changing my habit of deleting emails from my inbox to archiving everything.  When you delete an email, Gmail will permanently remove it from your trash within 30 days.  So going back and searching for that important email or contact that you accidently deleted a few months back is impossible.  I would suggest archiving those emails after you are done with them and want to clear them out of your inbox.  By archiving, it actually removes the "Inbox" label from them, but keeps them in your "All Mail" container.  This way, if you want to go back and search for that important email that you archived from a few years back, it will still be there.  For a more detailed look at archiving vs deleting, click here to watch the video.