Why would you want to save email as PDF?
- How often do you buy a piece of software online and they send you a code or receipt via email?
- How often do you have important emails that you need to save forever?
I know I do and often. Anything from receipts, to tracking important conversations, to software download codes, I receive it it all via email.
Unfortunately, email is not always a reliable or convenient way to keep track of those types of things (especially free email offerings like Gmail). It is always better to save a copy of them. Let’s face it, three months after you made that reservation, you may not remember the details and can’t find it easily. And let’s not even talk about years of communications, like often happens in business.
So, what can you do?
The obvious answer is to organize your email into folders (or Labels in Gmail). Here is the thing, mail servers go down, emails get lost, emails can be difficult to find, and you need a network connection to even look for them. So, I don’t recommend relying on your email client to keep and organize important emails.
A better solution is to save your emails as a file and organize them somewhere safe, like on your device (with backups of course) or synced to the cloud on OneDrive.
That’s where saving your email as PDF comes in. In this article I will cover how to save an email as PDF on Surface tablets when using the built-in Mail App.
[Note: this does not pertain to other email clients because they are all slightly different.]How to Save email as PDF from Mail App on your Surface tablet
- Open your Mail App and go to the email you want to save
- At the top right, click or tap the three dots … to pull down the menu
- Chose Print (yes, I know, it not intuitive but you’ll be “printing to a file”)
- Select Microsoft Print to PDF
- Click Print
- Give your file a name and location where you’d like to save it
- Click Save
You now have a copy of your email saved in the location you specified above and you can move it to any folder you like. I like to save anything I purchase online into a folder on OneDrive that is divided into sub-folders for Receipts, Software codes, Travel reservations, etc. But you can simply create a folder structure that works for you.
A couple of notes: If your email is very long, it may take a minute or two to save the file. If you’re still using Win 8.1 the procedure is different and you will most likely need to use OneNote as an intermediary (unless you have PDF writing software).
Cheers!
Joanna