How to Save an Email as a PDF in Gmail, Outlook, and Apple Mail

Sooner or later you need an email as a file: a receipt for expenses, a confirmation for a visa application, a paper trail for a dispute. Screenshots look amateur and crop badly. Every major mail app can produce a proper PDF, and in every single one the trick is the same: it's hiding behind the print button.

Gmail

Open the email.
Click the printer icon at the top right of the message (or the ⋮ menu > Print).
In the print dialog, change the destination to Save as PDF.
Click Save.

Gmail's print view strips the interface and keeps the headers (from, to, date, subject), which is exactly what you want for anything official. One quirk: it prints the whole conversation if the thread is expanded. Collapse the replies you don't need first, or use the printer icon on a single message rather than the thread-level print.

Outlook (new Outlook, classic, and web)

All three variants work the same way: open the message, press Ctrl + P, and choose Save as PDF (web) or Microsoft Print to PDF (desktop) as the printer. Classic desktop Outlook also has File > Print with the same printer choice.

If Microsoft Print to PDF isn't in your printer list, it's been switched off in Windows. Our Microsoft Print to PDF guide covers turning it back on in about a minute.

Apple Mail (Mac)

Open the email and press Cmd + P.
Click the PDF dropdown in the bottom-left corner of the print dialog.
Choose Save as PDF.

The bottom-left PDF dropdown works in every Mac app, not just Mail. Once you know it's there, you'll use it constantly.

On your phone

iPhone: in the Gmail or Outlook app, open the email, find Print in the ⋮ or share menu, then pinch outward on the print preview. It secretly becomes a full-screen PDF you can share or save to Files. This is one of iOS's strangest hidden gestures, and it works in nearly every app with a print option.

Android: same starting point, open the email, choose Print, then pick Save as PDF from the printer dropdown at the top.

What about attachments?

This catches people out: printing an email to PDF captures the list of attachments, not their contents. The PDF will show "invoice.pdf (56 KB)" as a line of text and that's it. If the attachments matter, download them separately, then combine everything into one file so nothing gets lost in a folder somewhere.

Our merge tool runs in your browser, so a confidential email never touches anyone's server: drop in the emailed PDF plus its attachments, drag into order, download one file.

Saving lots of emails at once

Print-to-PDF is fine for one email and miserable for fifty. For bulk export, Gmail's Google Takeout exports entire labels as MBOX (convertible to PDF with desktop tools), and Outlook desktop can drag messages to a folder as .msg files. Honestly though, for anything under a couple dozen emails, the print dialog and some patience is usually faster than setting up a bulk workflow.