How to Save an Email as a PDF in Gmail (Desktop, Phone, and Automatic)

There are two versions of this question, and they need different answers.

The first is "I need this one Gmail message as a PDF right now." Gmail can do that in about four clicks, on desktop and on your phone, and the steps are below.

The second is "I need to keep saving emails as PDFs, forever, without thinking about it." Print dialogs are a bad answer to that one. That's further down.

This guide is Gmail-first. If you're in Outlook or Apple Mail, the save an email as a PDF page lays those clients out side by side. The short versions, plus Thunderbird, are further down here.

Gmail (Desktop Browser)

1. Open the email. If you're looking at a thread, click the message you want so it's expanded on its own.
2. Click the printer icon at the top right of the message, next to the reply arrow.
3. In the print dialog, set Destination (Chrome) or Printer (Firefox, Safari) to Save as PDF.
4. Click Save and choose where the file goes.

Two things people trip over. The printer icon at the top of the whole thread prints every expanded message in the conversation, not just the one you're reading. And Gmail's print view drops the sidebar and labels, so the PDF shows sender, recipient, date, subject, and body only.

If images look wrong in the preview, close it, scroll the email so every image loads, and try again.

Gmail (iPhone and Android)

1. Open the email in the Gmail app.
2. Tap the three-dot menu at the top right of the message.
3. Tap Print.

On Android, choose Save as PDF in the printer dropdown, then tap the download icon.

On iPhone, the print preview appears. Tap the share icon in the corner and choose Save to Files, or pinch outward on the preview thumbnail to open it full screen and share from there.

Mobile print output is narrower than desktop, so wide tables and multi-column newsletters get squeezed. For anything with a layout that matters, save it from a computer.

Outlook

Outlook on the web

Open the email, click the three-dot menu at the top right, choose Print, then Print again in the preview. Set the destination to Save as PDF and save.

Outlook for Windows

File > Print, pick Microsoft Print to PDF as the printer, click Print, then choose a filename and location. Print Options lets you include or exclude attachments as a list of names, though the files themselves still aren't in the PDF.

Outlook for Mac

File > Print, then use the PDF dropdown at the bottom left of the dialog and choose Save as PDF.

Apple Mail

On macOS, the direct route is File > Export as PDF. Pick a location and you're done.

The print route also works and gives you more control: File > Print, then the PDF dropdown at the bottom left, then Save as PDF.

On iOS, open the message, tap the reply arrow, choose Print, then tap the share icon in the preview and pick Save to Files.

Thunderbird

File > Print (or Ctrl+P / Cmd+P), then select Save to PDF as the destination and save. Thunderbird's print preview respects the message's HTML fairly closely, which is more than some clients manage.

What Print-to-PDF Doesn't Do

For a single email, printing is genuinely the right tool. It stops being the right tool the moment you're doing it repeatedly, and here's why.

Attachments are left behind. The PDF is the message body. The signed contract that came with it is still sitting in your inbox. You now have half a record, and the half you'll want later is often the file.

Images can come out broken. Printing captures what the browser has loaded. Remote images that failed to load, or that the print stylesheet skipped, become blank boxes. Nothing warns you, and you usually notice a year later.

Filenames are whatever you typed. Nobody names files consistently at 6pm on a Friday. Six months in, the folder is a mix of invoice.pdf, invoice(1).pdf, and Screenshot 2026-03-04.pdf.

It only happens when you remember. This is the real one. Every email you didn't save is invisible. You don't discover the gap until you go looking for something that was never there.

Phones make it worse. Print-to-PDF on mobile takes six taps and produces a narrower, uglier document, so in practice people just don't bother when they're away from a desk.

The Automatic Version

If any of that sounds like your situation, the fix is to take yourself out of the loop.

Quicktion gives you an email address like abc123@in.quicktion.io that's tied to a Google Drive folder. Forward an email there and it lands in Drive as its own subfolder:

Contracts/
  2026-08-12_Statement of work, Q3/
    email.pdf
    email.html
    SOW-Q3-signed.pdf

email.pdf is the message with a header block on top (from, to, date, subject) and the body below it, with images downloaded and embedded so they still render years from now. email.html is the original HTML, kept as a fallback for messages whose layout is too elaborate to render cleanly. The attachments sit right there with the email that delivered them, under their original filenames.

Folder names come from a pattern you control. The default {date}_{subject} produces 2026-08-12_Invoice from Stripe, which sorts itself chronologically. {sender} and {domain} are available if you'd rather group by who sent it.

Two ways to save:

Forward it. Any email client, any device. Manual forwards work, and a Gmail filter or Outlook rule turns it into something that runs without you. Set from:billing@stripe.com once, and every future receipt files itself.

Click it. The Gmail add-on puts a save button in Gmail's sidebar. Open an email, pick your Drive destination, save.

The honest limits: no Shared Drives yet, My Drive folders only. No OCR, so scanned attachments go in exactly as they arrived. No backfill, so it saves from the moment you set it up rather than reaching back into your inbox. And a small "Saved with Quicktion" line appears at the bottom of PDFs on the free plan.

Manual vs Automatic

Print-to-PDF is the right call for the email you need right now. For the emails you'll need in two years, and don't yet know about, a rule beats a habit.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I save an email as a PDF in Gmail?

Open the email, click the printer icon at the top right of the message, then set the print destination to Save as PDF and click Save. Gmail prints the message you opened, so open a single message rather than the collapsed thread if you only want one.

How do I save an email as a PDF on my phone?

In the Gmail app, open the email, tap the three-dot menu and choose Print. On Android pick Save as PDF. On iPhone the print preview opens, and you tap the share icon to Save to Files. The Apple Mail app follows the same path through the reply menu.

Does the PDF include the attachments?

No. Printing to PDF captures the message body only. Attachments have to be downloaded separately, which is the step people usually forget.

Why do images look broken in my saved PDF?

Because printing captures whatever is loaded in the window. Images hosted on the sender's servers can fail to load, or get skipped by the print stylesheet, and then the PDF has empty boxes. Loading all images before printing usually fixes it.

Can I save emails as PDFs automatically?

Yes. Quicktion renders each email to a PDF and saves it in a Google Drive folder along with the attachments, either when you forward it or when you click save in the Gmail add-on. Set a forwarding rule and matching emails file themselves.

How do I save a whole email thread as one PDF?

Expand every message in the thread first, then print. Gmail includes expanded messages and skips collapsed ones. Long threads paginate awkwardly, so for anything you actually need to reference later, saving each message on its own is more usable.

Next Steps

If you're here because of one email, you're done: use the print steps for your client above.

If you're here because you keep doing this, set up a Drive destination and forward one email to see what the PDF looks like. The free plan covers 25 emails a month.

More on the automated setup in the forward emails to Google Drive guide, and on saving attachments specifically in save email attachments to Google Drive.