How to Save a Gmail Message as an EML File

Email & Messaging

Updated July 12, 2019

If you want to read a Gmail message in a text editor or word processing program, you can download it as a text file easily enough. However, if you want to open it in a different email client, you might need to save it in a different format, specifically as an EML file.

You can also backup EML files, and share them with others without forwarding the original messages. Whatever your reason, Gmail makes it easy to do the conversion.

Open the Gmail message.
In the top-right portion of the message window, select the menu icon (three horizontal dots).
From the menu, choose Show original to open the full message as a text document. It opens in a new window.

From here, you can use either of two ways to convert the email to the EML format; the first is the easiest.

Method 1: Save File as EML File Format

In the text document, right-click Download Original.
Choose Save link as.
From the Save as type menu, select All Files instead of Text Document.
Add .eml to the end of the file name, then save it as you would normally save a file to your hard drive.

Method 2: Convert File to EML Type

Highlight and copy all of the text in the Gmail message. If you're using Windows, press Ctrl+A to highlight all of the text and Ctrl+C to copy it. If you're on macOS, use Command+A to select the text, and Command+C to copy it.
Paste all of the text into a text editor such as Notepad++ or Brackets.
Save the file with the .eml file extension, as above.