How to Export Emails from Gmail: 2 Free Ways (2026)

Gmail has two free ways to export email. For a few specific messages, select them, click More (⋮) and choose Forward as attachment to get EML files. For all of your mail, open Google Takeout, check Mail, and download the MBOX archive it builds.

People usually need this when they switch providers, run out of Google storage, owe a client a record of a finished project, or want a backup that does not depend on one login. This guide walks through both methods, how to save a single email as a file or a PDF, and the limits worth knowing before you start a multi-gigabyte download.

Export one email or a few from Gmail (EML)

When you need specific messages rather than everything, Gmail's Forward as attachment feature is the fastest path. It handles up to 50 emails at a time.

1. Select the emails

   Log in to Gmail and check the boxes next to the emails you want to export. To grab everything under a label, click "Select all X conversations in [Label]" at the top of the list.

2. Open the More menu

   Click the "More" button (three vertical dots) in the top menu bar above the message list.

3. Choose Forward as attachment

   Pick "Forward as attachment" from the dropdown. Gmail opens a new email with each selected message attached as an individual .eml file.

4. Send it to yourself

   Address the email to yourself (or a trusted recipient) and send. Treat it carefully: those attachments contain the full content of the original emails, including anything sensitive.

5. Download the files

   Open the received email and download the .eml attachments. They open in email clients like Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird, or Gmail itself.

EML is a lightweight, widely compatible format, and each file is one self-contained email. If the attached emails add up to more than 25 MB, Gmail attaches them through Google Drive instead (Gmail Help). If your selection is bigger than 50 emails, skip this method and go straight to Takeout.

Download all your Gmail emails with Google Takeout

To export all emails from Gmail at once, use Google Takeout. It packages your whole mailbox, or only the labels you pick, into one archive you download.

1. Open Google Takeout

   Go to the Google Takeout page and sign in with the account you want to export.

2. Select Mail

   Click "Deselect all" so Drive, Photos and the rest are left out, then check "Mail". Leave "All Mail data included" as it is to export all emails, or click it to pick specific labels. Click "Next step."

3. Set delivery and format

   Pick a delivery method (a download link by email, or "Add to Drive" to send the archive straight to Google Drive), a file format (.zip or .tgz), and a maximum file size. Archives larger than that size are split into multiple files.

4. Create the export

   Click "Create export". Google says this takes anywhere from a few minutes to a few days, depending on how much data the account holds.

Download the archive to your computer

When the export is ready, Google sends you an email. In that email, select Download archive. If the archive was split, download every part.

Unzip the file and open the Takeout folder. Your mail sits in Takeout/Mail as one or more .mbox files, which you can import into a desktop client such as Thunderbird to browse.

Do not leave it for later. Google says the archive expires in about 7 days and can be downloaded 5 times (Google Account Help). After that, you run the export again.

Takeout delivers your mail in the MBOX format: one archive file holding the whole mailbox, compatible with many email clients but not directly readable on its own. Control is coarser than the EML method. You can filter by label, but you cannot hand-pick individual emails.

The "Add to Drive" delivery option is worth highlighting: if the point of the export is a cloud backup rather than a local copy, it keeps gigabytes off your computer entirely.

Save or copy a single email

Sometimes you only need one message on your computer, or in another account. Gmail can save it as a file or a PDF, or copy it across by forwarding.

• As an EML file. Open the email, click More (⋮) at the top right of the message, then Download message. You get an .eml file, which needs a desktop mail client such as Outlook or Thunderbird to open (Gmail Help).
• As a PDF. Open the conversation and click Print all at the top right, or More then Print for a single message (Gmail Help). In your browser's print dialog, choose "Save as PDF" as the destination.
• To another email account. Click Forward to send it on, or use Forward as attachment so the other account receives the original as an EML file. For a whole mailbox, use the Takeout archive above.
• Into a spreadsheet. Gmail has no CSV export. For mail you have already received, you would have to convert an MBOX file with a third-party tool. For mail arriving from now on, you can log each email to Google Sheets as it comes in. The four ways to do that, from Apps Script to no-code tools, are compared in how to update Google Sheets when an email arrives.

Which method to use when

The short version: one email, download or print it. A handful of known emails, use Forward as attachment. Everything else, use Takeout.

The limits of Gmail exports

All of these methods are free and reliable, and the bulk ones have edges worth knowing before you commit an afternoon:

• The 50-email cap is hard. Forward as attachment will not take more, and there is no native middle ground between 50 emails and a whole-label Takeout job.
• Takeout cannot cherry-pick. Labels are the finest filter, so exporting "just the Johnson project threads" means labeling them first.
• MBOX is not a reading format. The archive needs an email client to open, so a Takeout export is a storage artifact, not something you browse like a folder of PDFs.
• An export is a snapshot. It is accurate the moment it finishes and stale the day after, so backups need repeating on a schedule.
• EML attachments carry everything. Forwarding emails as attachments moves their full content, so be deliberate about where that forward goes.

For genuine backup, migration, or compliance needs, these are acceptable trade-offs and Takeout is the right tool. The one case it serves poorly is the most common one.

If you export email to find answers, skip the export

A lot of Gmail exports are not really backups. They are attempts to get at the knowledge buried in old threads: what we quoted this customer last year, how we handled that refund, what the agreed spec was. Exporting a mailbox to MBOX so you can search it elsewhere is a lot of ceremony for what is, at heart, a lookup problem.

That lookup is the problem InboxPilot works on directly. It is an inbox-native AI email agent that grounds its drafts in your own email history, docs, and website, inside the Gmail account where the conversations already live. When a question arrives that your old threads already answer, the agent drafts the reply from that history, with a human approving each send by default. The knowledge stays where the conversations happen, and it stays current, which a snapshot never does.

To be honest about fit: InboxPilot is built for repetitive operational email in business inboxes, not for archiving. If you need a legal record, an offline backup, or a migration file, Takeout is free and correct, and nothing replaces it.

Related reading

• Gmail auto reply and automation: vacation responders, templates and AI replies set up step by step.
• How to update Google Sheets when an email arrives
• How to generate emails using your documents
• Gmail shared inbox and shared mailbox tools: if the reason you are exporting is that several people need the same mailbox.

Run the Takeout export if you need the archive, and if what you actually need is the answers inside those threads, try InboxPilot free for 7 days and let the history keep working where it is.