Archive is a Gmail feature that removes the Inbox label from a message, letting you clean up your inbox without deleting anything. It's a good idea to archive [rather than delete] messages you may wish to refer to some day. All archived messages can be found in several different ways: in the All Mail label, in any labels you've applied to them, and in Gmail's search results. When someone replies to a message you've archived, the conversation containing that message will reappear in your inbox. In legacy applications, archiving your email stores messages where they're no longer accessible.
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