Saving an email as a PDF is useful for record-keeping, sharing email threads with people who weren't on the original thread, or filing correspondence alongside related documents. Every major email client supports this โ the steps just vary slightly between them.
How to Convert an Email to PDF in Gmail
Open the email in Gmail. Click the three-dot menu in the top-right corner of the email (not the browser menu โ the one within the email itself) and select Print. Gmail opens a print preview. In the print dialog, change the destination to Save as PDF and click Save. The email is saved as a PDF including the sender, recipient, date, subject line, and body.
For email threads with multiple replies, Gmail's print function captures the entire thread in the order it appears on screen. If you only want specific messages from the thread, expand those messages and collapse the others before printing.
How to Convert an Email to PDF in Outlook
In Microsoft Outlook on Windows, open the email and go to File > Print. In the print dialog, select Microsoft Print to PDF as the printer and click Print. Choose a save location when prompted. In Outlook on Mac, go to File > Print and use the PDF dropdown in the bottom-left of the print dialog to select Save as PDF.
Outlook's PDF output includes the full email header โ From, To, CC, Date, Subject โ followed by the message body. Attachments are not included in the PDF; they remain as separate files.
Converting Emails to PDF on iPhone and Android
On iPhone, open the email in Mail, tap the reply arrow at the bottom of the screen, and scroll down to find Print. In the print preview, pinch outward on the thumbnail to convert it to a PDF view, then tap the Share button and save to Files.
On Android, open the email in Gmail or your mail app, tap the three-dot menu, select Print, then choose Save as PDF from the printer dropdown. The process works the same way as saving a webpage to PDF on Android.
Including Email Attachments in the PDF
Standard email-to-PDF conversion only captures the email body, not attachments. If you need the email and its attachments in one file, download the attachments separately, convert them to PDF if they aren't already, and then use WukongPDF's Merge PDF tool to combine the email PDF with the attachment PDFs in the right order.
This creates a self-contained record of the correspondence and all related documents โ useful for legal matters, compliance records, or client project archives where everything related to a communication needs to be stored together.
Organizing and Naming Email PDFs
The default filename for an email-to-PDF export is usually the subject line, which may be long or contain characters that cause issues in some file systems. Rename the file immediately after saving to something consistent โ a date-based format like 2025-06-15_ClientName_Topic works well and sorts chronologically in any file manager.
If the email PDF is large due to inline images, running it through a PDF Compression tool trims the file size without affecting the text content. Most email PDFs compress well since the images are often not optimized for document storage.