I have been figuring out how to work with Google Gmail and it’s generally being going well, but I’m wondering if there’s any way to save an entire thread of email messages in a file? Plain text would be nice, a PDF would be awesome, but I could handle HTML too, if that’s my only option, Dave.
Well, you can use the “Save As…” feature of your Web browser while you’re in Gmail, but that will tend to get you pretty crazy, confusing HTML files that contain the messages in the email thread you desire, and a whole lot more.
Instead, there’s a snazzy way to accomplish what you desire and, heck, if you’re on a Mac, I’ll even show you how to save a Gmail mail thread as a nice, neat PDF document.
Start by going to the message thread you want to work with. Doesn’t really matter if you have all the individual mail displayed or not.
It’ll look like this:
What’s important is to look to the right of the messages, where you see what I’ll call the “threaded”commands:
Choose “Print All” and two things happen rather quickly: first, a new window opens up:
and, on top of it (at least on a Mac), a print dialog shows up:
If you’d like, you can just print your message thread here, but instead, since you are on a Mac, look on the lower left corner and notice the PDF button. Click on it:
There ya go. Choose “Save As PDF…” and you’ve just saved your message thread as a neat, simple PDF document, suitable to forward to colleagues, archive, or whatever.
If you’d rather get the text or clean HTML, simple cancel the printout by clicking “Cancel” and then when you’re looking at the threaded message display window shown earlier, simply choose “Save As…” and you can get the HTML.
Want to get the text only? That’s easier than you think: just choose “Select All” from the “Edit” menu, then choose “Copy” from the same menu, open up something like TextEdit and paste the text directly.
Between these three methods, I hope one will meet your needs!
Thank you very much! that helped me a lot (-:
I sure don’t see how to do this. What exactly are you referring to that you refer to as the “threaded command”?
Thanks!
For me the “print all” button was without text and on the top of the screen
Thanks for the tip on printing Gmail messages!
Hi Dave,
I needed to capture an old, long thread in which a friend described some obscure capability of a program he wrote. So I opened all 11 messages in entire thread and tried to print it. The resulting physical print had the GMail by Google icon at the top, and separator lines between where the thread sections were separated, but the only text that made it to my printer were in blue font, a Canon Pixma MX882. Oh, be aware that my computer is Mac Mini circa 2009 running MacOS 10.6.8. My browser is Firefox currently v25.0.1.
I also tried creating a .PDF file and printing that, same problem, as with previewing the thread and printing from that.
I tried the same thing with a Win XP PC also running Firefox 25.0.1 and had the same result.
So I think it is a font’s problem. What to do?
Thanks,
Bob
That’s very strange, Robert. And it’s not in blue when you view it on the screen? Not sure what to advise other than to try a different browser or borrow someone else’s computer?
This indeed is very helpful. Though the option was neatly given on top of the chain mail thread, however I didn’t see it. Thanks for the article as this has saved my time and lots of efforts. 🙂
Hello Dave,
Great info, thanks. My question is about gmail for pc.
I have a search thread that yields over 400 items. In each line item there contains multiple emails.
I do not want to print all these emails, I would like to print the line item search page with all of them there. Normally gmail gives you 20 per page (adjustable to 100) but I would like to print out just the search results.
Any info would be appreciated. Thanks