What is All Mail in Gmail?

Last reviewed: October 7, 2026 · Markdown version

All Mail is the place in Gmail where every message you have kept can be found, whether or not it is still in your inbox or carries a label. It is not a folder you file things into. Gmail organises mail with labels, and Google is direct that "Labels are different from folders." (Create & manage labels in Gmail, read 7 October 2026). Inbox is a label, your own labels are labels, and All Mail is the view that ignores them and shows the lot. Neither the labels page nor the other Gmail Help pages cited below gives a one-line definition of All Mail, so this page assembles one from what they do say.

Why archived mail lives there

Archiving takes away the Inbox label and nothing else. Google: "When you archive a message, it no longer appears in your inbox, but you can still find it under the “All mail” label." (Archive Gmail messages, read 7 October 2026). That is why All Mail is usually much bigger than the inbox: it holds every archived message alongside everything that is still in the inbox. Pulling out only the archived ones, with the in:archive search, is the job of finding archived emails.

What All Mail leaves out

Spam and Trash. Google does not put it that way in a sentence, but its search controls show it. A normal search covers All Mail, and "By default, emails in Spam and Trash aren’t included in a standard search."; to include them, you change the dropdown next to Search from "All Mail" to "Mail & Spam & Trash" (Search in Gmail, read 7 October 2026). The operator in:anywhere does the same from the search bar: it will "Find emails across Gmail. This includes emails in Spam and Trash." (Refine searches in Gmail, read 7 October 2026).

Where to find it

On a computer it is tucked away: on the left, click More, then All Mail. In the Android and iPhone apps, tap Menu at the top left, then All mail (the Archive Gmail messages page above, and its Android and iPhone versions, read 7 October 2026).

Deleting from All Mail

Because All Mail is the whole mailbox, deleting there is not like removing a message from one folder. Google's labels page: "When you delete an email, it’s removed from every label and your inbox." (the Create & manage labels page above). It goes to Trash, where "Up to 30 days after deletion" you can still get it back (Delete messages in Gmail, read 7 October 2026).

The same delete page lists All mail among the places where select-all can grow from one page to everything, through the notice that reads, in Google's example, "Select all 2,000 conversations in Inbox." As we read those pages together, in All Mail that link selects your entire mailbox apart from Spam and Trash. Narrow it with a search first, such as older_than:2y or a sender, unless everything is really what you mean. Whether a message should be archived or deleted at all is weighed on archive or delete.

All Mail in Outlook, Apple Mail and other programs

A mail program that connects over IMAP sees labels as folders. Google's developer documentation says "Gmail treats labels as folders for the purposes of IMAP", and its example folder list includes "[Gmail]/All Mail" marked with the special-use attribute \All (IMAP Extensions, read 7 October 2026). Since All Mail contains messages that also appear under Inbox and your labels, a program that downloads every folder can fetch the same message more than once. Choosing which labels a program sees is on what Show in IMAP means.

All Mail is also where IMAP deletions often end up. Google's recommended settings for mail programs say: "You can find messages you delete from an IMAP folder in your "All Mail" label in Gmail." (Choose your IMAP email client settings for Gmail, read 7 October 2026). If you deleted something in Outlook or Apple Mail and found it again in Gmail, that is the usual reason, and why deleted emails keep coming back goes through the settings involved.