How To Save Emails On Gmail, Microsoft Outlook, And Apple Mail To Your Hard Drive

Karamchand Rameshwar - Nov 21, 2019

You want to save all of your emails on your Gmail, Microsoft Outlook, or Apple Mail to your hard drive? Here is how to do so.

Saving emails on Gmail

Step 1: Go to Gmail and click on the ‘three vertical dots’ icon in the upper right corner of the screen, next to the Reply button

Save Email Gmail Microsoft Outlook Apple Mail 1

Step 2: In the menu that appears, choose Download Message

Save Email Gmail Microsoft Outlook Apple Mail 2

Your email will be saved to the default folder named ‘Download’ with the extension format .eml. This file type can be opened by any email server or web browser.

There's still no way to download multiple emails at once, so if you want to download lots of them, use Google's Takeout service to store your data.

Saving emails on Microsoft Outlook

Step 1: Open the email and click ‘File’

Save Email Gmail Microsoft Outlook Apple Mail 3

Step 2: Click the ‘Save As’ button

Save Email Gmail Microsoft Outlook Apple Mail 4

Step 3: Select which folder you want to save the emails on, then click the ‘Save’ button

Save Email Gmail Microsoft Outlook Apple Mail 5

Your email will be downloaded in .msg format, and can only be opened by Microsoft Outlook.

You can also select and drag an email from Outlook into a folder in Windows, which will be handy when you want to download multiple emails at once.

There is currently no way to download emails from the web version of Outlook, so you need to have Microsoft Outlook installed on your computer.

However, if all you want is the content of the email, not the email itself. You can save email on the web as a PDF file and download it to your computer. This method works on Windows 8, Windows 10, and macOS. How to do that:

Step 1: Open Outlook with a browser, click the 3 dots button in the upper right corner, then click the ‘Print’ button

Save Email Gmail Microsoft Outlook Apple Mail 11

Step 2: In the window that appears, click ‘Print’

Save Email Gmail Microsoft Outlook Apple Mail 6

Step 3: In the Print dialog box, select ‘Print to PDF’

Save Email Gmail Microsoft Outlook Apple Mail 7

Saving emails on Apple Mail

Step 1: Open the email, click ‘File’ then ‘Save As’

Save Email Gmail Microsoft Outlook Apple Mail 8

Step 2: In the newly opened panel, edit the email name (if necessary), select the folder you want to save it on, and then click the ‘Save’ button

Save Email Gmail Microsoft Outlook Apple Mail 9

This email will be saved in .rft (Rich Text Format) format. You can choose one of two types of format: ‘Plain Text’ or ‘Raw Message Source’ before clicking the Save button.

Save Email Gmail Microsoft Outlook Apple Mail 10

Similar to Outlook, Apple Mail also allows you to drag & drop emails from the apps to folders on your computer. Therefore, you can use that to save multiple emails at once.