Can You Download Emails to Hard Drive?
Of course! Everybody can download emails to hard drives. If you want to do so, you can skip to the next 3 sections to learn the specific steps. But first of all, let’s explain why export emails to a hard drive for 3 reasons.
- Offline Access: Unlike accessing emails on email servers that must need a network connection, when you store emails on a hard drive, you can access these emails whether your devices can connect to the Internet or not.
- Organization: You can better organize your emails if you download them to a hard drive because you can divide them into different folders or subfolders which are named by criteria that make sense to you.
- Backup: Like downloading Google Drive files to a hard drive as a backup, you can also backup emails from Gmail to hard drive. By doing so, if you accidentally delete an email, you can also access that email on your hard drive.
If you are interested in saving Gmail emails to hard drive, don’t miss the following methods.
Download Emails from Gmail to Hard Drive via MultCloud [More Customizable]
The first way that this post wants to show you is also the best way to download Gmail to hard drive. It is downloaded by MultCloud Download. MultCloud is used to manage your multiple cloud drives by transferring, syncing, backing up, and migrating one cloud drive or email server to another cloud. And Email Download is designed for exporting emails in PDF format.

- Cloud Transfer: Transfer files or folders from one cloud drive to another without downloading and uploading.
- Email Migration: New function for migrating emails from an email server to a cloud drive easily.
- Cloud Sync: Automatically sync one cloud with another cloud in one-way or two-way mode.
- Cloud Backup: Backup your files between clouds regularly and securely.
- Share: Keep sharing trails and allow others to upload files without an account.
Using MultCloud Download, you don’t need to export emails one by one. You can download up to 200 pieces of Gmail emails at once. Also, Download Settings offers you various options to meet your demands. This wonderful function will show up by the end of May and you can further understand it with the following steps at first.
Before following the steps, it would be better if you change the download destination to the hard drive in your browser settings.
Step 1: Open MultCloud and click “Sign up Free” for a new MultCloud account.
Step 2: Click “Add Email” and select the Gmail icon. After you log in to your Gmail account, Gmail is added to MultCloud successfully.
Step 3: Enter Gmail by clicking it in the left sidebar and select the folders or emails that you are willing to download.
Note: The folders shown on MultCloud correspond to the features and categories in Gmail. For example, if you want to download emails that are sent by yourself, you have to open the folder named “Sent”.
Step 4: Tap “Download” and name the PDF or package. If you have the need to save attachments or choose other settings, you can tick the options. If not, click “OK” and finish your operations.
Note:
When you have more than 1 email to download, MultCloud will export them as a package and all the emails and their attachments included in this package will be listed individually.
Download Settings:
- Save Attachments: If you tick the box of this option, the attachments will be also downloaded along with emails.
- Conversation Format: Each message in an email will be demonstrated one by one without repeated references.
- Save the last message only: Only the last message will be shown in the single format and the former messages will be listed as its quotations.
Download Emails from Gmail to Hard Drive via Google Takeout
Also, you can use Google Takeout to save Gmail emails to hard drive because Gmail is one of Google’s apps. That means this way is particularly designed for Gmail instead of other email servers and it can’t be universally used. Besides, Google Takeout will hint to you that the downloading process may cost hours or even days until it is fully complete, so the transfer speed is not very fast.
Step 1: Sign in to your Google account and choose “Data & Privacy” in the left bar. Then scroll down the page until you see “Download your data” under “Download or delete your data” and click on it.
Step 2: Click “Deselect all”, scroll down the page to find “Mail”, and tick the box next to it. Then you need to continue scrolling down the page and click “Next step”.
Step 3: Choose “Send download link via email”. Then select the Frequency and File type & size, and click “Create export”.
Step 4: Turn to your Gmail and download the emails from the link to your hard drive.
Download Emails from Gmail to Hard Drive via Outlook
Additionally, you can backup Gmail to Outlook first and then save the emails to a hard drive. But this way is more complex since it has more steps.
Step 1: Sign in to your Outlook and go to Settings. Then select “View all Outlook settings”.
Step 2: Click Mail in the left bar, choose Sync email, and select Gmail.
Step 3: Enter a Display name and choose “Connect your Google account so we can import your email from Gmail” and “Create a new folder for imported email, with subfolders like in Gmail”. Then click “OK”.
Step 4: Log in to the Gmail account which you want to export emails from and click “Allow”.
Step 5: Download the emails (They will be converted as PST files after the above steps.) to your hard drive.
Conclusion
All these 3 ways are free and easy to use, so you can choose a preferred one to try. But the first way is recommended because it can be used for other email servers. Although the post only shows how to download emails from Gmail to hard drive, the same steps of the first method can be also applied to Office 365 Mail and Outlook which are coming soon on MultCloud.
What’s more, you can try other functions to solve some cloud-to-cloud problems like how to sync Google Drive with OneDrive. By MultCloud Cloud Sync, this problem can be solved with simple operations and fast speed.