Best way to print a group of email messages from Gmail?

by philg

Folks:

I’m coming to the horrifying conclusion that we do actually need desktop applications and Microsoft….

I’m trying to print a group of email messages from Gmail. I want these printed to PDF and, ideally, including attachments. I would have thought that I could select the messages in question, e.g., everything with a particular label, and click “print all to PDF” but there is no such option. Yahoo Mail, despite the $365 million paid to the CEO, doesn’t have this feature either. Thunderbird is awesomely easy to connect to Gmail but what it does is offer to print one message at a time and the attachment won’t be opened up and included.

Outlook 2016 is a nightmare to hook up to Gmail. Microsoft doesn’t have an “I am a Gmail-using idiot so set everything up for me” option (you end up having to type custom port numbers and select security protocols by name). Outlook 2016 also doesn’t comply with Google’s latest security requirements so you need to go deep into the Gmail settings and allow lower security clients. When you’re all done, at least for those of us who have Acrobat Pro installed, you’re rewarded with options to push an entire folder or group of selected messages out to PDF. It isn’t perfect because it seems to make one PDF per message and then gather them all into a portfolio. There is no option to have just one big file. (This third party tool may make it easier to deal with the output.)

Does anyone have a better idea?

8 thoughts on “Best way to print a group of email messages from Gmail?”

  1. Here’s how I would do it if I really had to…

    Go here

    https://developers.google.com/apis-explorer/#search/gmail/gmail/v1/gmail.users.labels.list

    click “Authorize with OAuth 2.0” and sign in, allow access.

    Then enter your email address in the input fields, click execute

    Find the label you want

    Now go to https://developers.google.com/apis-explorer/#search/gmail/gmail/v1/gmail.users.messages.list

    Enter the label you want, and your email address, click execute…

    You’ll see a bunch of message ids.

    Now for each message id, open a browser tab with the URL:

    https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?ui=2&view=pt&search=inbox&th={{ enter gmail message id here }}

    You probably will want to script that last bit, if you’re on a mac you could write a bash script or python script pretty easily.

  2. My first thought was to use Evernote.

    You can forward an e-mail and attachment to Evernote. From the Mac Evernote desktop app, I was able to right click and convert to PDF (I’m not sure if this is a paid feature). Multiple notes can then be merged into one from within the app.

    Good luck.

  5. Pete: Thanks for that idea, but we’re talking about 500+ threads in a folder. I don’t want to engage in 500 repetitive operations per folder.

  8. The terminal mail client `mutt` with `muttprint`. Sucks to set up but it does work for this.

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