How to download emails from Gmail

Gmail is undoubtedly one of the top popular email clients that offers a lot of benefits. Being a part of Google Workspace, it has become an essential part of our daily lives. There are times when you want to download your emails from Gmail for backup or offline access purposes. Let’s explore how we can do that:

Single email download:


  1. Open the email you need to download from the inbox or inside any label by clicking on it. 
  2. Click on the three dots icons in the top right corner to open the drop down menu. 
  3. Select “Download message: and a new window will open showing that email’s contents. 
  4. Download the email as .eml file by clicking on the download button. The email can be opened with an email client once you choose to save it to any location on your computer. 
  5. If you need to download another email, repeat steps 1 to 4 to achieve that. 

Bulk Email download - Download all emails using Google Takeout:


Google offers a service called Google Takeout that allows you to download all your data from all Google services including Gmail. Below are the steps to follow in Google Takeout:


  1. Go to takeout.google.com to access the Google takeout service. 
  2. Sign in using Google credentials if not already logged in. 
  3. Select the service you want to download data from. Select Gmail to download data. 
  4. Choose the format of the data after download like .zip, .tbz etc. 
  5. Select how you want to download the data, whether you need to send it to Google Drive or download directly to the computer. 
  6. Click on “Create export” to start the export. 
  7. The exporting process takes some time to complete depending on the amount of data. You receive a notification on Gmail once the export is complete. 

Using the above outlined steps, you can download the emails from Gmail. These steps will help you download data very quickly and easily.