Many email clients give you shortcuts for archiving mails, but not deleting. I‘m used to trash mails of which I think I won’t need them in the future, because over the years my gmail storage will get to small for all the mails. But actually I’m not sure what archiving means in the first place. I still move my mails to specific folders or I trash them, but I feel others have more efficient workflows. I think there’s something I miss about archiving and deleting. Help?
To my understanding, Archiving in GMail simply removes the tag ”Inbox” from the item. It is still availabe in your ”All mail” view. Moving to folder is just replacing the Inbox tag with the tag name for the ”folder”.
I also delete as much as possible to reduce hits on searches. Those ”Great deal - expires in 24 hrs” emails won’t be of much value later, will they 
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I’m an email minimalist and only keep a few emails in my mailboxes. At present I have less than 60 emails in all my mailboxes. Anything I want to keep long term gets moved to an Action mailbox and periodically gets saved as PDFs and then stored in my filing system. That gives me one place to go for my records. An example is receipts I want to keep. I get some via email, some via web pages, and some scanned in from paper. They all get saved as a PDF and filed.
Much easier to backup and access from different devices.
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Am I right that in the Apple Mail app on the iPhone there even isn‘t a way to delete a mail? I only find the archive button. Don’t you people delete mails?
Oh: there is a trash when in an icloud account, but not in Gmail?
@Robert I believe changing this setting should get you what you are after: Settings–>mail–>account–>advanced–>deleted mailbox (rather than archive)
Thanks! That wasn’t obvious.
No it is not obvious at all. 