Exporting Gmail

Save as PDF

There are times when you may find it necessary to export some of your emails to another format for some reason. Of course, the easiest and best known way to do this is simply to "print" an email to a PDF file from within Gmail.  But this only works for printing a single email or a single conversation.  If you want to print more, you need to open each conversation separately and print as a separate document.

Bulk Export:

There may be times when you may want to export dozens, maybe even hundreds of emails at once.  Exporting each email individually would be tedious and time consuming.  Fortunately, there is an App that may save you the trouble.  Gmail Print All Pro allows you to select an entire folder full of email and generate a Google Drive document that includes all the messages.  You can choose to exclude images and/or attachments as you prefer.

This is a free app available in the Chrome Web Store.  Once installed, simply select the folder you wish to print, make sure the settings are as you want them and press "create".  A Google Drive document will be created in your Google Drive with all of the email.  Attachments and images are stored separately.  However, images should appear in the document and the attachments will be accessible from a link within the document.

Limitations

There are a few limitations.  First, the printer limits you to up to 80 conversations.  More than that will be saved to a second document.  The reason for this is that the documents should not become too large and unwieldy.  Keep in mind that if you have conversation mode on, you may have a back and forth with someone that includes dozens of individual emails.  That counts as only one conversation.

Gmail Print All Pro will only print documents connected together in a single folder or label.  If you want to print a bunch of miscellaneous emails, you can select them, then add them all to a single label.  Then, run the print job.  After it is done, you can simply remove the label again if you wish.

Once the emails are stored in Google Drive, you can share those documents with anyone else who uses Gmail and give them either read-only or edit rights to those files.

In my brief testing of Gmail Print All Pro, I found a few problems.  One was that some emails seemed to become double spaced rather than single spaced with no explanation why.  Another issue is if I wanted to then take that Google Docs file and create a PDF out of it.  The links in the PDF would only go back to the original Google Docs folder unless you manually edited all of them.  Therefore, I don't recommend using this unless you are only sharing via Google Drive, or you don't care about links to attachments.

Conclusion

If you need to share select emails with someone and don't want to bother saving each one individually, this can be a good option.