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

To save an email as a PDF, open the message, choose Print, and select a PDF destination in the print dialog. Gmail, Outlook, and Apple Mail all work this way, because none of them has a native Save as PDF command. Microsoft says so outright, and Google never uses the word PDF at all.

Every Route to a PDF Runs Through the Print Dialog

A PDF of an email is a photocopy. It captures what the page looked like, and it leaves the original behind.

Keep that photocopier in mind, because it explains almost every complaint people have about this process. The headers, the routing data, the read state, and often the attachments don’t come along. What you get is a picture of the message body, which is fine for a receipt and thin for a legal record.

Wait, why does every guide say “Save as PDF” then? Because that phrase belongs to the operating system’s print dialog rather than to any email app.

Windows supplies Microsoft Print to PDF and macOS supplies a PDF menu in its print sheet. The email client just hands the message to whichever one is there.

What Each Client Documents, Side by Side

Client	Native Save as PDF?	Documented route	Are attachments included?
Gmail	No, and Google never writes “PDF”	More menu, then Print	Not documented
Classic Outlook	No, Microsoft states this	File, Print, Microsoft Print to PDF	Yes, a print option controls it
New Outlook	No, Microsoft states this	More actions, Print, Microsoft Print to PDF	Not documented
Outlook on the web	No, Microsoft states this	Print, then Microsoft Print to PDF	Not documented
Mail on Mac	No, but Apple mentions PDFs	File, Print, PDF menu, Save as PDF	Not documented
Mail on iPhone	No, Apple documents printing only	None published by Apple	Not documented

Five of those six rows say “not documented” for attachments. That single column explains more support tickets than anything else on this page.

How to Save a Gmail Message as a PDF

Open the email, click More at the top right of the message, then click Print. In the print dialog that opens, change the destination to Save as PDF and click Save.

One detail rarely gets mentioned. Google’s own help page for this is titled “Print Gmail messages,” and the string “PDF” appears zero times on it.

That holds across the Computer, Android, and iPhone tabs. Google documents the printing half and leaves the PDF half to your browser.

That’s a sourcing warning rather than a criticism. Any article that quotes Google on saving a PDF is quoting something Google didn’t write.

Print One Message or the Whole Thread

Gmail draws a line between the two, and the control is easy to miss. Google documents both under separate headings.

• One message: use the More menu on that specific message, then Print. Google’s wording is “If there are multiple emails within the same conversation, you can print just one of those emails.”
• The whole conversation: click Print all at the top right of the thread. That button is labeled “Print all,” not “Print conversation.”

Getting this wrong is the usual cause of a one-page PDF when you expected twelve.

Gmail on Android Wants a Real Printer First

The mobile route has a prerequisite Google states plainly on the Android tab.

To print from your phone or tablet, add a printer that can get data by Wi-Fi or mobile network.

So the Android print sheet expects a printer to exist before it gives you much. Android’s own system print service does offer a Save as PDF destination, and that’s Android’s feature rather than Gmail’s.

Confidential Mode Blocks This Entirely

If the sender used Gmail’s confidential mode, there’s no PDF to make. Google’s sentence covers both halves: confidential mode “prevents printing message text and attachments.”

No workaround exists inside Gmail. Gmail also has an offline mode, and it doesn’t change this restriction either.

How to Save an Outlook Email as a PDF

Microsoft is the only vendor that addresses this question head on, and its answer is a flat no followed by a workaround. It repeats the same sentence in all three Outlook clients.

New Outlook doesn’t include PDF as one of the defaults Save as types. The Microsoft Print To PDF utility included in Windows 10 and Windows 11 allows you to print any email message directly to a PDF.

That means the PDF route in Outlook is a Windows feature borrowed by Outlook. On a Mac running Outlook, the Windows print driver is absent, so you use the macOS print sheet instead.

The Steps, Per Outlook Client

1. Classic Outlook: open the message, go to the File tab, and select Print. Choose Microsoft Print to PDF from the Printer drop-down. Pick a folder and file name in the Save Print Output As box.
2. New Outlook for Windows: select More actions, then Print, then Print. Choose Microsoft Print to PDF in the Printer dropdown, then use the Save Print Output As box.
3. Outlook on the web and Outlook.com: same print-to-PDF steps. Microsoft’s separate Download route saves an .eml or .msg file rather than a PDF.

Outlook Is the Only Client That Documents Attachments

One short sentence sits in the classic Outlook tab of Microsoft’s print article. It’s the only affirmative statement any vendor makes on this subject.

You can choose whether to print any attachments.

That’s it. One line, in a tab nobody opens by default, on a page most readers leave without clicking anything.

Every other client leaves the question open. Gmail, Apple Mail, new Outlook, and Outlook on the web all publish nothing about attachments in a printed message.

We checked all of them for this article and found nothing.

What Outlook Will Save As, If Not PDF

Microsoft names .eml and .msg for saving a message, and Outlook on the web offers the same two through Download. Notably, Microsoft no longer publishes the old .msg, .htm, .txt and Outlook Template list on its current page. It now just says to “accept the default type, or choose another file type in the list.”

HTML survives as the documented bridge to Word. Microsoft’s route is to save the message as HTML, open that file in Word, then save it as a .docx. Saving a message as a Word document or a template “is currently not supported for new Outlook.”

How to Save an Email as a PDF on a Mac

In Mail on Mac, select the message and choose File, then Print. Click the PDF menu at the bottom of the print sheet and choose Save as PDF.

Apple splits this across two guides, which is why it’s hard to find.

Apple’s Mail guide gives you one sentence and no steps.

As an alternative to printing messages, you can save them as files or PDFs.

The steps live in the Mac User Guide, under saving a document as a PDF rather than under Mail.

Worth knowing before you select twenty messages: Apple states that “if you selected multiple messages, each one is printed separately.” So multi-select gives you many PDFs, never one combined file.

One housekeeping note from our research. Apple removed the Mail print page from the current macOS guide, and the live URL now redirects to the guide’s welcome page. Versioned URLs for older macOS releases still serve the article, which is where the wording above comes from.

How to Save an Email as a PDF on iPhone or iPad

Apple documents no way to do this from Mail on iPhone. That’s the honest answer, and it contradicts nearly every article on the subject.

Apple’s page is now titled “Print an email or attachment in Mail on iPhone,” and it runs about 75 words. It covers exactly two actions: tap the reply icon then Print, or tap an attachment then Print. There’s no PDF, no Save, and no Share Sheet.

Ugh. And it used to be better.

The older Apple page was called “Print or save an email.” Apple dropped the words “or save” from both the title and the URL.

The pinch-to-zoom trick on the print preview is real and widely used, and it’s also folklore. No Apple documentation describes it, so we’re not presenting it as a supported feature. If you need a reliable PDF from an iPhone, forward the message to yourself and make the PDF on a computer.

How to Save an Email as a PDF on Android

Open the message in Gmail, tap More, tap Print, then change the destination to Save as PDF in Android’s print sheet. The Save as PDF destination belongs to Android, not to Gmail.

Google’s Android instructions stop at Print and add the printer prerequisite quoted earlier. So if the print sheet looks empty or unhelpful, that’s the documented behavior rather than a fault on your phone.

How to Convert an Email to PDF Without Printing

You can’t, not through any documented vendor feature. Every published route for Gmail, Outlook, and Apple Mail passes through a print dialog, even though nothing is printed on paper.

The confusion is a naming problem. The print dialog is the operating system’s file exporter wearing a printer’s name. The “without printing” you want is the one you’re already doing.

Third-party tools do offer direct conversion, and browser extensions are the common route. We’re not naming a favorite here. The vendor-documented answer is what makes this page useful, and the extension market outruns any list.

Can You Save Multiple Emails as One PDF?

No vendor documents a way to do it. We checked Google, Microsoft, and Apple, and none of the three publishes a batch email-to-PDF feature in any client.

The closest each one gets falls short in a different way. Apple’s Mail prints multiple selected messages “separately,” one file each.

Gmail’s Print all covers a single conversation, and every Microsoft PDF instruction begins with opening one message.

Google Takeout Is the Real Bulk Answer, and It Isn’t PDF

For a full archive, Google Takeout exports your Gmail, and it exports it as a zip or tgz container. Google’s export pages name only those two container formats and never state the mail format inside.

Interesting detail: “MBOX” appears on none of Google’s consumer Takeout or Gmail export pages. The only Google property that defines mbox is Vault. It calls mbox “a standard format for storing messages” containing “message text and any attachments.”

Takeout does preserve something PDFs destroy. Google notes that “each message’s labels are preserved in a special X-Gmail-Labels header in your download file.”

When a PDF Is the Wrong Format

A PDF is a photocopy. It suits a human who needs to read something, and it fails a system that needs to verify something.

That distinction matters for legal, HR, and compliance work.

PDFs drop the full internet headers, which carry the routing path and the authentication results. An .eml or .msg file keeps them. If someone might later question whether a message is genuine, save the .eml and generate a PDF from it for reading.

For a sales presentation or a client-facing summary, the photocopy is exactly what you want. Clean, portable, and readable on anything.

Mobile users sometimes reach for a different client entirely. The Spark Mail app on iOS and the Spark Mail app on Android are common alternatives. Verify any third-party client’s export behavior yourself before it becomes part of a records process.

Why Teams End Up Doing This at All

Most PDF-saving happens because someone needs proof of a conversation. A commitment was made, a deadline was set, and the record lives inside an inbox nobody else can see.

EmailAnalytics is a Gmail and Outlook add-on that visualizes team email activity. It reports response times, volume by sender, and busiest hours, using metadata rather than message content. Our page on what EmailAnalytics stores and what it never touches spells out the difference.

Our own Q2 2026 benchmark study covered 25,384,649 emails and found an average work-hours response time of 4 hours 10 minutes. When a thread is being saved as evidence, the delay in that thread is usually the thing under discussion.

Start Here: Save One Correctly Before You Save a Hundred

1. Decide whether you need a readable copy or a verifiable record. Readable means PDF. Verifiable means .eml or .msg.
2. Open one message and produce the PDF using the route for your client above.
3. Open the PDF and check whether the attachments came through. Don’t assume they did, because only classic Outlook documents this.
4. Check that the whole thread is there. In Gmail, that means using Print all rather than the single-message Print.
5. For an archive rather than a document, use Google Takeout and accept an output that isn’t a PDF.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do you save an email as a PDF?

Open the message, choose Print from its menu, then select a PDF destination in the print dialog that appears. Windows supplies Microsoft Print to PDF and macOS supplies a PDF menu with Save as PDF. No email client has its own Save as PDF command.

Can you save an email as a PDF with attachments included?

Only classic Outlook documents this, through a print option Microsoft describes as “You can choose whether to print any attachments.” Gmail, new Outlook, Outlook on the web, and Apple Mail publish nothing either way. Open the finished PDF and check it before you rely on it.

How do you save an Outlook email as a PDF?

Open the message, choose Print, and select Microsoft Print to PDF from the Printer drop-down. Microsoft states that no Outlook client includes PDF as a Save as type, so the Windows print driver does the work. In classic Outlook the path starts at the File tab.

How do you save an email as a PDF on an iPhone?

Apple publishes no way to do it from Mail on iPhone. Its current page documents printing a message or an attachment and nothing else. Forwarding the message to yourself and creating the PDF on a computer is the reliable route.

Can you save multiple emails as one PDF?

No vendor documents a batch email-to-PDF feature. Apple prints multiple selected messages separately, one file each, and Gmail’s Print all covers a single conversation. Google Takeout handles bulk export, and it produces a zip archive rather than PDFs.

What is the best format to save email evidence?

Save the original .eml or .msg file, then create a PDF from it for reading. A PDF drops the internet headers that carry routing and authentication data, which is what makes a message verifiable. Outlook and Outlook on the web both export .eml and .msg.

Does saving an email as a PDF keep the formatting?

It keeps the rendered layout as your client displayed it at that moment. Remote images that failed to load stay missing, and anything the print stylesheet hides stays hidden. That’s why a PDF is a photocopy of the view rather than a copy of the message.