Archiving an email reply is a very tedious task: you have to compose a reply message, send it to its rightful recipient, and then find it in your inbox before you can finally save it to your archives. If you want a hassle-free process of archiving an email reply, you should probably check out the new Send & Archive feature from Gmail Labs.
Organizing the Gmail inbox
Send & Archive is an experimental feature from Gmail Labs that helps you organize your Gmail inbox by allowing you to forward and archive an email message with just one click. Enabling the Send & Archive feature automatically adds a Send and Archive button to the compose box every time you reply to an email. The Send and Archive button, when added, can be found before the Send button.
Enabling the Send & Archive feature
The first thing you need to do to enable the Send & Archive feature from Gmail Labs is to click on the Settings link that is found at the upper right side of your Gmail page. Clicking the Settings link activates the menu where you can change or modify your Gmail settings. To view a list of the experimental features that are currently offered via Gmail Labs, click on the Labs tab in the Settings menu. Because the Send & Archive feature is found near the end of the list, you have to scroll down to the bottom of the page in order to see it. To activate the Send & Archive feature, click on the tiny dot beside the Enable option. Don’t forget to click the Save button before you check the appearance of the Send and Archive button on the compose box.