Helping people with computers... one answer at a time.
To save mail from a webmail service you need to download it to your machine. Not all webmail services make saving email easy, so we improvise.
At my Yahoo email account box i have more than 3000 messages already read. I would like to keep some of them "forever". How could I transfer them to a safer place, like a pendrive? I know that some email accounts (Yahoo, gmail...) say they will keep them, but...things change, we all know that.
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It's not just that things change, things break. Passwords get forgotten. Email accounts get lost.
Depending on exactly what you want to do I can think of two general approaches to save email for posterity. One, at least, will work with any email service. The other will depend on exactly what features the service provides.
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POP3
My (strongly) preferred approach is to use a POP3 email client, like Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird or any of a hundred or so others, and download your email to your PC. Once downloaded you can typically save individual messages however you like - my favorite approach is to create a special folder in the email program and copy things there.
One of the reasons I recommend it so strongly is that it's also my recommended approach to backing up your webmail, regardless of how long you plan to keep it. As I said above, stuff happens, and having all of your email saved on your PC (where you should also be backing it up along with all of your other important files) means that even if the webmail service goes away completely, you haven't lost your important messages.
Windows Live Hotmail now supports POP3, as does GMail. Yahoo, unfortunately, apparently only supports it in some countries. There are unofficial POP3 add-ons that may allow you to access Yahoo and other web mail services.
An alternative, of course, is to forward your important emails to a service, like perhaps GMail, that you can then download from.
Print to PDF
I think of this as more of an archival approach, but since almost every webmail service has some kind of function to print a message, you can use this function in conjunction with a PDF printer to create PDFs on your PC of specific emails that you want to save.
If you don't have a PDF printer, I'm partial to the free PDF Creator. Download and install that and you'll find a new "printer" on your machine. Anything you print to that printer will be saved as a PDF.
Here's your question, which I get by email, saved as a PDF, and displayed in Foxit Reader:
PDFs have become fairly universal, and as I said above, you can save just about anything you can print: email - plain or HTML - web pages, documents and more.
The downside is that once printed it's no longer email, so you can't easily use it again to, say, forward or reply. If that's your real intent then I'll refer you back to my first suggestion of downloading into an email client.
You can still print to PDF from there for archival, if you like.
Article C3724 - May 7, 2009 « »
Leo A. Notenboom has been playing with computers since he
was required to take a programming class in 1976. An 18 year career as a programmer at Microsoft soon followed.
After "retiring" in 2001, Leo started Ask Leo! in 2003 as a place for answers
to common computer and technical questions. More about Leo.
May 29, 2010 12:50 PM
thnx man.one question that comes to me is when i send a mail through an email client it gets save in the "sent items" of the email [link removed] there anyway in which i can also save the same mail on the server too eg: yahoomail.so that i can also access the sent items by browsing my yahoo account,incase if my hard disk crashes.wud be grateful for this solution.thnx in adv.
02-Jun-2010
June 17, 2010 1:48 PM
I use a library computer for my PC--slightly communal. Is that why I lose each Yahoo email when I read it once?
19-Jun-2010
January 31, 2011 2:45 PM
From my in box Yahoo Email List,
I highligthed the headings To, Subject and Sent Date
Use the "Copy" the headings i HL,
Place cursor on the Subject heading and
Right Click "Save Taget as " ....
Past the Title I coped.. To, Subject and Date
as file name removing the comma slash and periods
Saves in orginal HTML format to PC folder...
August 4, 2011 12:24 PM
I've prepared, sent and have tried to save several emails from my deenalouise@ YAHOO account but my emails aren't saving why? I've used several different library computers.
Thanks
Deena
October 7, 2012 8:26 PM
There is a free website called emailexporter.com. you can chose up to 25 emails at a time and save them as a single pdf file (you can print them if you would like). you don't have to download anything and its free!