save email as pdf

[Qwertworks]

Let us save an email as PDF document when using outlook.com or 365.

For example I would like to set up a flow that lets me archive all emails that come are put into a certain folder as PDFs to my OneDrive. From what I see this does not seem to be possible as of right now.

[jpwplc]

Is there a way to have either the PDF (or preferably) the .eml or .msg format of the outlook mail be printed/attached as a page in a section of OneNote? Storage on the OneDrive folder is good, but even better would for my workflow would be to have each e-mail be printed/pasted into its own page within a section of a OneNote notebook.

[ashiqf]

Hi @teqs

I agree there should be standard action from Microsoft. Find my response to your questions below:

• I had tested Inline images and also images hosted public, ConvertAPI endpoint was able to convert. PDF was created with the images as expected
• For 1 PDF with 2 images, it took around 10 seconds
• For higher or lower compressions, I've not tested it. There are different parameters you can pass on the API endpoint. Check it on the ConvertAPI website.

Again I am not advocating the ConvertAPI, I've just found the free plan thought of consuming it on Flow. You can also host the API in Azure for converting email to PDF with some C# code, there are opensource PDF libraries (PDFSharp, iTextSharp etc) available. 

[aramirez_3]

I am trying to convert the time stamped on the converted email section "Sent On" . I was able to convert from UTC to my time zone (using the convert time zone connector after the "When a new email arrives" trigger) which i used for the PDF name but i'm curious if there is a way to convert and paste the updated time on the actual PDF. Any thoughts?

For example.. here is the time stamp listed on the converted email. It states it came in at 2:16 pm UTC but i need it to be listed as 8:16 am MT. 

Thank you !

[sajarac]

Hi @v-xida-msft ,

quick question, our company has an email retention policy of one (1) year, My question: is possible to add a date range or select time period to save all the email under the selected timeframe?

I would like for instance have saved all my emails from July. Or even better at the end of July 31st @ 11:59 pm will trigger my flow and start backing up my email from July 1st until July 31st and automatically saving all PDF's in my one drive?

Make sense?

Thank you kindly for any response

[Gitesh_Bajaj]

It helped Perfectly...

Thank You for your Help

[camerond01]

There might be a work around without resorting to external APIs. I tried converting to HTML instead of PDF to see if embedded images would come up correctly. My flow also saves all attachments, and treated those embedded images as attachments and saved them, which was unexpected but helpful. Looking at the HTML the part where the embedded images are has what looks like a temporary path created during the conversion process. Mine looked like src="C:\SandboxTempLow\as987df6asd876f87asd678f6as89\email_content\image001.png". When I removed the path from the src bit and just had src="image001.png" the HTML file showed the embedded image correctly when open in a web browser.

Perhaps the flow can edit the HTML file and replace the offending src string with the right one and hey presto HTML files show embedded images? Will see how it goes, hope this helps anyone else scratching their heads.

[teqs]

@camerond01Sounds great that you have a possible solution! I quit by trying it for a time by myself. 😞
It would be perfect if you could share your full flow when it works with different emails. Here is also a topic where your solution would be extremely interesting for people: : 

https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Flow-Ideas/Export-Mail-to-PDF-format-or-convert-eml-file-to-PDF-...

[camerond01]

The flow starts about the same as the accepted solution, but with a parallel workflow to also save each attachment:

From there it gets messy:

I had to escape the backslashes in the HTML source, changing "C:\blah\blah\" to "C:\\blah\\blah\\". For each email attachment looks like this:

That's right, we're calling a Javascript function inside an Excel spreadsheet residing on OneDrive from a Flow. Because Flow's don't have regex built in, and I guess that MS don't want to cannibalise serverless functions revenue. Got the idea from here: How to use Regex in Power Automate (tachytelic.net)

Except nothing ever works the first time and I had to write a test harness to work out the bit with escaping the backslashes. Out of an abundance of caution I concat'd the attachment name into the variables being passed. Javascript is as per the above link.

If something like this comes up again I'm going to stand up an API endpoint on my public facing server and just make calls to that and deal with everything at my end and send back results, because quite frankly this is a ridiculous solution to a stupid problem. I mean yeah it works, but at what cost.

[Anonymous]

has anyone had issues with this flow with external email address, gmail or not office 365 accounts? is there a solution? 

[jaxonanthony021]

Users can read this blog to save Outlook email as PDF. This blog has explained the two types of solutions, manual and professional methods. Both methods are helpful and perform successfully. So read the blog carefully and get these solutions. 

[jaxonanthony021]

If you want to save Outlook emails as PDF, read this article. It has explained the best techniques via manual and automated methods. All the methods are very efficient to perform. But many non-technical users may not perform the manual approach. So they can go with the professional method.

[teqs]

Built-in solution to convert Emails to PDF stops working because "Convert file", which is used to convert to PDF, is not accepting "*.eml" anymore. It delivers an error message.

{
  "status": 406,
  "message": "Conversion of this file to PDF is not supported. (Sandbox_BadArgument_ArgumentNull / An exception occurred while executing within the Sandbox)",
  "source": "api.connectorp.svc.ms"
}

I tried to simply change the exported email from *.eml to *.html, but with *.html the conversion of email with "Convert file" is not working well. It does not identify the email header and display it correctly anymore.

Is there any currently working solution to export incoming emails to PDF with built-in Power Automate nodes?

@v-xida-msft: I see you are "Community Support" and posted the solution ( https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Building-Flows/save-email-as-pdf/m-p/109222/highlight/true#M1071... )

Would be very nice if you could communicate with MS that your posted solution is working again. As I described, "Convert file" is not able to convert EML to PDF anymore. Thank you!

[elizabds]

This accepted solution works for me and the explanation about the final deletion step was helpful too. I changed 'Received time' to 'subject' since it works better for our team. I've been troubleshooting and LOOKING for this solution for a while. Great forum. Thank you!!

[teqs]

Hello @elizabds

 I hope you don't mind me asking a quick question. As in the accepted solution, you did a "Create File" of the incoming email-body to a *.eml-file. And from this "Create File" you placed the ID (result) into the "Convert File" as input?

This had not worked for me in the last weeks anymore, because "Convert File" threw an Error ("Conversion of this file to PDF is not supported") with a *.eml file. If this now works again, I will try to change it again next week. Just want to be sure it's the same solution.

Thanks a lot!

[teqs]

I tested today, and as @elizabds said already, the Email->*.eml->*.pdf workflow is working again. Still same problems as before, no images as example, but I do not get an error anymore when the "Convert file" input is named with extension *.eml.
Perhaps it's related to email content, i don't know. Or MS has fixed the isssue I postetd 3 posts before.
Anyway, seems to work fine again. Thanks!

[ayomalireid]

Ok, so just to be clear, there's currently no way to do this via the built in actions? Like other said, i can get the eml > pdf conversion, but it doesn't export the images with it.