How to Easily Save Outlook Emails to PDFs for Future Reference

Emails have become such an integral part of our life. Some emails may require to be distributed without the need to forward them in the form of an email on Outlook. In situations like these, the best bet is to convert your Outlook Email to any readable PDF format.

PDF also known as Portable Document Format is the most widely used documentation file type. It is low on memory, and for the most part, is not editable. You can lock the file with a password, in case you are delivering it to a secured space.

Here in this write-up, my sole focus is explaining how to save Outlook email as PDF.

Method 1. Save Outlook Email As PDF on Windows PC

There is another process that you can incorporate in saving the email as PDF. You can use the inbuilt printer instruction and then convert the file for printing purposes to PDF. It is fairly simple and easy to do and does not require a lot of steps.

Here, I would show you an empty Outlook account just for experimental purposes. But you can use your original emails and do it in the same manner.

Step1: Open the file you want to print

You can open your Outlook app by either searching it on your search bar or visiting the website of Outlook. The interface however is the same, you would not have trouble navigating around the options. Now go to inbox and open the email you want to print.

Step2: Right-click on the email and select the ‘Print’ option

Now what you need to do is on the body of your email right click on an empty space and select print. This will open your print window. On your print window, you need to select ‘save as pdf’ on the first available option.

Step3: Save it to MS Print to PDF

Once you move on to the next window, you will see a black window pane with the destination written. You need to select the ‘Microsoft Print to PDF’ option and click on Print. Select the destination you want to save the file. You can access the saved email from that specific location.

Method 2. Print Outlook Email to PDF on Mac

In Mac the steps are very direct and do not require a lot of meticulous explanation it’s quite simple and sleek.

Step 1: Open the Outlook app or website.

Simply open Outlook on your macOS or you can load Outlook’s mail on Safari.

Step 2: Click on the file and Print

You need to click on the file first and then from the list of options click on ‘Print’.

Step 3: Click on the ‘save as PDF’ option

You need to simply save the destination as ‘save as PDF’. Now simply choose the file destination by choosing the folder you want to save and you are done.

Method 3. Convert Outlook Email to PDF Online

Outlook does not allow you directly to convert your email to a PDF file. In order to do that, you need to save your email first in HTML by simply saving the webpage in a certain file location. Then use a PDF converter web portal/website to convert your email to PDF.

The process is very simple and easy. It’s pretty direct too. For added assistance, we will take the example of a web platform facilitating that process such as PDFgear. PDFgear can be used by Windows, iOS, and macOS users alike for the conversion process.

Step1: Save your Outlook email

The process here actually is very simple. Outlook by default saves any ‘n’ number of emails in HTML format only. You need to go to ‘file’ and then choose the ‘save as’ option.

Step 2: Open PDFgear online HTML to PDF converter

To convert a webpage to PDF using PDFgear HTML to PDF converter, you have two options. You can either drag and drop the HTML file (.html or .htm) directly into the converter, or provide a valid webpage URL.

Step 3: Convert HTML Outlook email to PDF

Once the webpage is uploaded, PDFgear will automatically convert the HTML into a PDF document in 3 seconds.

After the conversion process is completed, you can download your converted PDF file by clicking on the blue download button.

Method 4. Save Outlook Email as PDF with Attachments

If you have Adobe Acrobat software installed on your computer, then you can easily convert an Outlook email to PDF with attachments. You can do this by following these steps:

Step 1. Click on the attachment icon located below the message header to convert all attachments into PDFs.

Step 2. Follow the steps of selecting Attachments, choosing Actions, and clicking Quick Print. Then, choose Adobe PDF Printer to print Outlook email as PDF with attachments.

Conclusion

If you ask me what shall be the best method out of all the methods we discussed. I would say the inbuilt MS Print method does not require the intervention of any addon, you can simply save your PDF file without much hassle. Outlook is growing as MS is investing more in its apps. So, a lot more features will come up even a direct ‘save’ option.