I have several emails labeled for follow up and am now ready to "delete" them from the label. I'd like to archive them, but no longer have an archive option, only delete. I did have an archive option up until recently, but now only have a delete option? How can I restore the archive option?
Gmail – Restore Gmail Archive button
gmail
Related Solutions
If you can import the EML files into a mail client that support IMAP this will be easy.
It seems that Thunderbird can do this, but I'm not 100% sure. (Don't have a local copy to play with.)
Anyway, set-up Thunderbird to be an IMAP client for Gmail. (Lifehacker has an excellent guide to do this.)
Then, import your EML files into Thunderbird.
If necessary, move them to a temporary folder (called "Zimbra" perhaps) which will be a label in Gmail. Then just wait for IMAP to sync them all to the cloud.
After that you can delete Thunderbird, keep it around to make local archives of your e-mail, or keep using it as your main client.
I was able to do this a couple of years ago with thousands of messages from my Pegasus Mail client. (There was some pain in converting to a format that Thunderbird could read, but getting the messages into Gmail was the easy part.)
Under Settings (click the gear in the top-right corner), Account, look under the section titled Check mail from other accounts (using POP3):. Next to the account, select Edit Info.
You should see options to label messages coming into that account with a label. If you check "Archive income messages" the messages will skip the inbox, as the description states.
Alternatively, you can create a filter that does this. Create a filter, and in the "Has the Words" field, use this pattern:
(((from:(example@university.ac.uk)) OR (to:(example@university.ac.uk))))
This will match all emails to and/or from that email address.
Best Answer
The archive button is used to remove the INBOX label from a message.
If you are looking at a bunch of messages by clicking on the label, you will not see the archive button. If you click on a message it may appear under the more button/menu.
If one or more messages still has the inbox label the more menu will contain the archive command. If the selected messages don't have the inbox label, the archive command will not be in the list. This make sense.
If you want to remove a label you can do so by clicking opening a message and clicking the small X next to the appropriate label. Or by selecting one or more messages and using the label button to changes the labels for the message. The confusing thing is that if you are looking in the "folder view" of the label you will not see the label of interest next to each message.