What's the difference between delete and archive? (2024)

FAQs

What's the difference between delete and archive? ›

Depending on your email provider or company's policy, your deleted messages may be permanently purged from your trash folder automatically (often after 30 days). Your Archive folder is never automatically emptied. Any email you see in either the trash or archive folder can be moved back to your inbox folder.

Only delete emails you will never need again. It is best to archive emails that hold important information or documents you may need in the future.

Click Empty Trash now. This action permanently deletes your emails and frees up their storage space. If you delete many emails at once, it can take some time for the space to be freed up.

Archiving a conversation hides it from your inbox until the next time you chat with that person. Deleting a conversation permanently removes the message history from your inbox.

Archiving allows important emails and attachments to be kept safe and secure in a separate folder, they can then be referred back to later or deleted from the email archive when no longer needed.

Yes, archiving emails will save space in your primary inbox or database. During archiving, emails are moved and stored in a separate database on your archiving service provider's servers. This process removes emails from your server while still allowing you to access them.

The media that archived data has been stored on might become obsolete, thus rendering the archive useless in the future. If there was a theft or fire, archived data might be lost. There might not be another copy.

Instead of deleting emails, archive each email the moment you're done with it, without worrying about filing or labeling it: This makes processing your email a lot faster.

Try to Empty Deleted Items Folder for that you've deleted emails, they might still be in the Deleted Items folder. Empty this folder to free up space. Check Other Outlook Folders for that ensure all other folders in Outlook (Sent Items, Drafts, Junk Email, etc.) are empty or have been cleared out.

How long do emails stay in the inbox? ›

Unread Messages - Unread messages remain in your inbox for the life of the account. Deletions - By default, messages marked as spam, junk, or attachments are retained for 30 days. Messages marked as personal are kept indefinitely.

If an email is important, archive that one---or consider placing it into a folder or label that will make it easier to find in the future.

Whether you delete or archive an email message, it disappears from your inbox. A deleted message goes into the trash folder, but an archived message is defaulted to the Archive folder or All Mail on Gmail / Google Apps.

Ultimately, archiving vs. deleting comes down to what suits your needs best: archive if you need easy access to information and delete if you want quick decluttering of your inbox. If you need to free up space in your inbox because it's full, you'll have no other choice but to delete emails.

The key reason to archive your documents is to avoid losing data. All documents are vulnerable to being destroyed or corrupted (if digital), either maliciously, by accident, or by a natural disaster, such as a flood or fire. Electronic documents can be compromised by: security threats.

Sixty? Six thousand? Well, all of those messages and attachments take up space, whether they're unread, old, or archived. And if you're on Gmail and aren't one of those weird inbox zero people who stays on top of things, you might be running out of space.

The purpose of archiving is to hide certain items from your main library without deleting them. Archiving items does not consume any extra storage quota. The archived photos and videos remain accessible and searchable within the archive section of Google Photos.

Archiving of documents that are inactive is often necessary for legal or compliance reasons, or in case they're needed for an audit. As such, you need to perfect your document management workflow so that archived documents become easily retrievable, even if your small business doesn't frequently use them.

Keep all your email.

Instead of deleting emails, archive each email the moment you're done with it, without worrying about filing or labeling it: This makes processing your email a lot faster.

An archives is a place where people can go to gather firsthand facts, data, and evidence from letters, reports, notes, memos, photographs, and other primary sources.