In Zoho Mail’s existing archival model, emails are archived within the folder they originally belonged to. For example, if you archived an email from your Projects folder, it remains in that folder as an archived email and can be accessed using the View archived emails filter. This meant that archived emails were spread across your existing folders rather than collected in one place.

While this approach kept emails contextually grouped by folder, it also created a few challenges over time.

When accessing Zoho Mail through third-party email clients using IMAP, archived emails didn’t always sync reliably. This was due to a state mismatch between Zoho Mail and the IMAP clients. When an email that had already synced with an IMAP client is archived in Zoho Mail, subsequent state changes to that email—including deletion—aren’t always synchronized with the email client. This led to inconsistencies across devices and email clients.

There’s no straightforward way to see how much storage your archived emails are consuming overall. Because archived emails are spread across multiple folders, it’s difficult for users and administrators to get a clear picture of the storage consumed by archived messages.

For organizations managing multiple accounts, the in-folder archival model makes it difficult to audit, report on, and manage archived emails at scale.

Zoho Mail is moving to a single, dedicated Archive folder in your mailbox. Regardless of which folder an email is currently in, archiving it now moves it into this one unified location.

With single-folder archival the users will experience the following changes.