Remove a Gmail label

March 12, 2025 9:44 AM

In Gmail, I directed all emails from a specific person to bypass my inbox and land in a labelled folder that was automatically archived. I would like to undo this action, so their emails will now land in my inbox as usual. Hoping for very simple clear directions as I'm a bit baffled.
posted by vanilla.extract to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

Go to the gear-shaped icon in the top right of the window (that's "settings"), then select "See All Settings" at the top of the menu that drops down.

That will open the settings in the primary window area, with tabs across the top. Click on the one that says "Filters and Blocked Addresses".

That will show all your filters. Your setting is in there somewhere. You can use your browser's "find" function (or usually Ctrl+f) to search the page for your label, if the list is long and hard to look through.

Did that get you what you need?
posted by Lyn Never at 9:57 AM on March 12 [2 favorites]

Piggybacking off Lyn Never's answer, if you are wanting to put all those old emails into your inbox, you can build a new filter that does that - when you make the filter, you can check the box "apply to existing messages".
posted by Happydaz at 10:21 AM on March 12

Also, when you do find the filter, click edit and then you will likely come to a page with the meail address listed. Click continue. That brings you to the next page that has most of the options.
unclick the "skip the inbox" radio button. You can keep the label and it will land in the inbox with the label. The other option is to just delete the filter and start again.
posted by JohnnyGunn at 2:11 PM on March 12

Just to clarify, it sounds like you think the LABEL is doing the moving, and as Lyn Never pointed out, it's actually the FILTER. The filter puts the message in the label and can also archive it, delete it, forward it, etc. etc. So deleting the label isn't actually required, you just need to modify the rule to remove the archive command.
posted by tiamat at 6:10 PM on March 12