I’ve been using Gmail for more than a year now…and I’ve “transformed” from someone who doesn’t read emails to someone who sends out emails on a daily basis.
Its hard to list all the reasons why I like to use Gmail instead of any other email service, but the archive function is on the top of the list. It keeps my Inbox nice and tidy 
If you are a Gmail user and you seldom / never use the archive function, just take a look of the article below…you might start using it right away!
We hear reports that many users don’t archive their email. If you don’t regularly click on the “archive” button or never even thought about it, here are some reasons you might want to get in the habit. Archiving just means moving mail out of your inbox and storing it for safekeeping. Your messages will be waiting for you when you click All Mail or search for them.
I believe in hearing both sides of a story, so I present the other side of the archiving/deleting dilemma:
http://blog.gadodia.net/gmail-9-reasons-not-to-archive-messages/
[...] David Xie wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptA [...]
Email archive is not a Gmail only function. Almost all email client support this kind of functionality. It’s simply putting all the emails into a seprate place rather than the INBOX.
“Its hard to list all the reasons why I like to use Gmail instead of any other email service, but the archive function is on the top of the list.”
This reason is not valid at all. If you think this is the reason you use gmail, then abviously means that you don’t use other email service, or you don’t know much about computing.
Just create a folder call “archive”, and place your emails into this folder after you have read them.
Hi someone:
Thanks for your comments
I’ve used Hotmail, Yahoo, and a few Chinese email services before. You are right about creating your own folder and moving emails into that folder after you’ve read them…but Gmail is the first one that I’ve seen with “archive” function out of the box! With Gmail’s keyboard shortcuts, its even easier to move my emails to the archive folder 
Of course, email archive is just one of the reasons why i use gmail