How to automatically archive receipts in Gmail

Make one rule that matches the senders you actually buy from, apply a Receipts label, and archive on arrival. Run it with the label only for a day, check what it caught, then add the archive step. The receipts stay searchable forever and stop being something you scroll past every morning.

That works in plain Gmail with a filter, and it works in Conduit Mail — our AI-powered email client, currently in early access — where you write the rule as a sentence instead of filling in a form. Both recipes are below. Start with the thinking, because the rule is the easy part.

If you only want the native filter recipe, it is at the bottom — no signup, six clicks.

Why should receipts be archived instead of deleted?

Receipts are the mail you get most of and read least. A coffee subscription, a parking app, two food deliveries, a plugin renewal, the thing you bought once in 2024 that still emails you every time it ships. None of them need reading. All of them need keeping.

That is the tension. Receipts have almost zero value on the day they arrive and real value eight months later, when you are arguing with a retailer about a warranty or reconstructing a year of business spend for an accountant who wants dates. Deleting them is the one option that fails at exactly the wrong moment.

So the goal is not fewer receipts. The goal is receipts that are out of sight and still findable. Archiving does that; deleting does not.

Step 1: decide what actually counts as a receipt

Before writing anything, spend five minutes in your own mailbox. Search a couple of obvious terms — receipt, order confirmation, your invoice — and look at who is actually sending them. You will probably end up with a short list: write down whoever shows up more than once.

You are looking for three groups:

• Always a receipt. Payment processors, app stores, the two or three retailers you use constantly, your utilities. Anything from these senders can be archived unread.
• Sometimes a receipt. Airlines, hotels, anything that sends both confirmations and marketing. These need a subject or text condition on top of the sender, or you will archive a flight change notice.
• Judgment calls. Say a receipt lands from a store you bought from exactly once. No rule you write today knows about that sender. This is the residue, and it is the only part worth pointing AI at.

Skip the third group for now. A rule that covers the first two groups handles most of the volume, and it does it deterministically — same input, same result, no model in the loop.

Step 2: write the rule as one sentence

In Conduit, automations are written in plain English and turned into a structured rule you can read and edit. The sentence for the first pass looks like this:

When mail arrives from Stripe, Apple, Amazon or my utility company, label it Receipts.

Group two from Step 1 needs a second sentence, because the sender alone is not enough:

When mail arrives from Delta or Marriott and the subject contains receipt, confirmation or itinerary, label it Receipts.

The AND between the sender list and the subject condition is what keeps a flight change alert in your inbox where you will see it. Sender-only would have archived it.

What you get back is not a black box. It is a rule with conditions and actions laid out as fields — the sender list on one side, the label action on the other — and you can correct any of them before it goes live. Conduit’s rules engine supports twelve condition types and twelve action types, AND/OR condition trees, and conditions the AI evaluates for the cases that plain matching cannot express.

One rule, not twelve. Group senders into a single rule with an OR condition rather than making one rule per retailer. This matters practically: the Free plan allows five automation rules. Unlimited rules are a paid plan — see what the tiers cost at public launch. A rule-per-store approach burns through five before you have covered your grocery delivery, and the grouped version is easier to edit anyway.

If you want the longer tour of how conditions, actions and AI-evaluated matching fit together, that is email rules in plain English.

Step 3: start with a label, not an archive

Do not give a rule the archive action on day one. A condition that is 10% too broad will bury a flight change notice, and you will not find out until you go looking for it.

In Conduit there is no back-test, no dry run, and no match preview — Gmail’s filter builder does show you matching mail before you save, and we don’t yet. So the safe pattern is to make the rule’s only action a label, leave it running for a day, then look at what carries the Receipts label in your inbox. Anything mislabeled is a condition that is too broad — usually a sender who also emails you about things that matter.

Fix the conditions, watch one more day if the fix was significant, and only then edit the rule to add the archive action. Now new receipts get labeled and skip the inbox in one motion, and you already know what the rule catches because you watched it catch things in public first.

One nudge on naming: keep the label short and boring. Receipts is better than Finance/Receipts/2026 because you will type it into a search box under time pressure, possibly on a phone.

Step 4: the back catalog is a Gmail job

Rules act forward. A Conduit rule runs on mail that arrives after the rule exists, and it does not reach back into the four years of receipts already sitting in your mailbox. The limits are spelled out in what rules don’t do yet.

For the existing pile, do it once in Gmail’s web interface as a bulk operation:

1. Search for one sender or domain at a time: from:receipts@example.com or from:example.com.
2. Add a date bound if the results are enormous: from:example.com before:2026/01/01.
3. Tick the select-all checkbox, then click the banner link that offers to select every conversation matching the search — without that click you only have the page you can see.
4. Apply the Receipts label, then archive.

The first sender takes two minutes because you are learning the banner; the next twelve take twenty seconds each, because Step 1 already told you who they are. One sitting clears years of backlog, and it only ever has to happen once. From then on the rule keeps up.

How to find old receipts in Gmail eight months later

Everything above only pays off in the ninety seconds you spend hunting for a receipt with a retailer on hold. Here is what that ninety seconds looks like in each client.

In Gmail, the query is mechanical and worth memorizing: label:Receipts after:2025/01/01 before:2025/12/31. If you do not want to think about dates, label:Receipts newer_than:1y does the same job. Add a sender or an amount if you remember one. Gmail’s search operator reference has the full list.

In Conduit, you type what you actually remember — “the receipt from that camera shop last spring” — and search turns the sentence into structured filter chips you can see and adjust. If it guessed the wrong date range, you change the chip instead of rewriting the query. The sentence is interpreted by Claude; the filters it produces then run against mail already on your device, and nothing is indexed on our servers.

Conduit also sorts new mail into six categories, one of which is Transactions. That is a convenience, not a guarantee — anchor anything that matters to your money on a sender or a label. Treat the category as a second way to browse rather than the thing your tax records depend on. The rule and the label are the reliable path. More on how the AI pieces fit together in what Conduit actually does.

Doing the same thing with a plain Gmail filter for receipts

You do not need us for the basic version, and it would be strange to pretend otherwise. Gmail filters are free, deterministic, and run on Google’s side whether or not any client is open.

1. Open Gmail on the web, click the settings gear, then open the full settings.
2. Go to the Filters and blocked addresses tab and start a new filter.
3. In the From field, put your senders separated by OR: receipts@example.com OR billing@example.net OR example-store.com.
4. Optionally narrow it with a Has the words condition like receipt OR "order confirmation" OR invoice.
5. Create the filter, then tick the options that apply a label (create Receipts) and skip the inbox.
6. Tick the option to also apply the filter to matching conversations, which sweeps the back catalog in the same step.

Google renames these controls from time to time. If a label on screen does not match the wording here, the filter documentation has the current field-by-field detail.

Where this stops is the third group from Step 1: the unfamiliar sender you have never bought from before. A static filter has no opinion about them, so those receipts keep landing in the inbox and you keep adding addresses to the filter by hand. A rule with an AI-evaluated condition can make that judgment call instead, which is the trade — a filter costs nothing and does exactly what you wrote, an AI condition draws on your plan’s AI usage and handles the long tail. Every plan gets the whole mail client; what changes on paid plans is AI capacity and the rule limits.

Either way, do the sender inventory first. The rule takes minutes; knowing what you are matching is the actual work.

One sentence, one rule, and receipts stop being a thing you scroll past. Conduit Mail is in early access at conduitmail.app — bring the sender list you just wrote.