How to Print Multiple Gmail Messages in one go

John Q. Public is an attorney at a law firm and, as part of an ongoing litigation, the court has asked their clients to produce hundreds of email conversations associated with a case as hard copies. They are using Gmail with Google Apps and all the emails are safely stored in the mailbox but how to automatically print them all on paper?

Gmail doesn’t offer an option to print multiple email threads in a batch but that feature is available in Microsoft Outlook, the desktop program. You can import Gmail emails into Outlook, select several messages and then hit the Print button. Outlook will group all the selected email messages into a single PDF file or you can send them directly to any connected printer.

There’s an alternate approach as well. You can select multiple emails in Gmail and apply a common label. Next use an add-on to save these emails as neatly-formatted PDF files into your Google Drive. Once the PDFs are ready, you can either print them through Google Cloud Print or download the PDF files to the desktop and print to the local printer.

Here’s a step by step guide on how to print email messages and attachments in Gmail in bulk:

1. Go to Gmail, select one or more email threads and apply a common label (like To Print) to all the selected email threads.
2. Go to Google Drive and create a folder, say Gmail Files, where the selected Gmail messages would be stored as PDFs.
3. Download and install the Save Emails add-on for Google Sheets.
4. Inside the Google Sheet, go to Add-ons > Save Emails and Attachments > Create New Rule. Here select the Print Gmail label from the dropdown and then select your Google Drive folder.

Click the Create Rule button button and the add-on will save your marked Gmail emails into Google Drive every hour. Or you can go to the Manage Rulesmenu and run a rule manually to immediately save the marked email threads (including attachments) into Drive.

Once all the emails have been saved, right-click the “Gmail Files” folder in Google Drive, and choose Download to save all emails to your desktop. And now you can send them all the emails to the printer with the simple Ctrl+P or (Cmd+P on Mac) keyboard shortcut.

How to Setup a Whitelist in Gmail

Have you ever come across a situation where you were expecting an important email from a known sender but the mail never made it to your Inbox? Instead, Gmail had incorrectly classified that mail as spam and thus moved it to the junk mail folder.

Gmail filters are pretty awesome at detecting spam but they do sometimes make mistakes. So how can you prevent Gmail from marking mails from certain legitimate senders as spam?

How to Whitelist an Email Sender in Gmail

There are two ways to whitelist email addresses, or even web domains, in Gmail.

One, you should add the email addresses of all the known contacts to yourGoogle Contacts list. Google will almost always deliver messages to your Inbox when the ‘From:’ address of the message is listed in your Google Contacts database.

The other thing you can do is create a manual whitelist in Gmail to ensure that email messages from certain senders are never ever marked as Spam. You can in fact whitelist entire domains so that messages from your colleagues reach your Inbox irrespective of whether you have added them to your Google Contacts or not.

Here’s how you can whitelist email addresses and domains in Gmail:

Step 1: In Gmail, click the “Create a Filter” link which is placed just next to the search box.

Step 2: In the From: field, enter the email addresses, domain names or even actual names of people who you would like to whitelist. You can separate multiple entries using OR (in Caps) or with the bar (|) sign.

Step 3: Once your filter is ready, click Next and select “Never Send it to Spam.”

That’s it! Now messages that match the above criteria will always get delivered to your Inbox and won’t ever be marked as spam.

Trivia: Did you know that Windows Live Hotmail offers a safe senders list where you can put email addresses and domains of known contacts and Hotmail will never mark messages originating from these addresses as spam. That’s much easier than setting up a whitelist filter in Gmail.

Make GMail the Default EMail Client in Firefox

Vamsi Kiran is using Firefox as his default web browser but when he clicks some email hyperlink (mailto:) on the web, IE opens up with the Yahoo! Mail homepage.

Vamsi would like to see the GMail compose window open up inside Firefox (not Internet Explorer) when he clicks any email hyperlink on web pages.

Download the free Google Talk chat application and open the options dialog. You'll see a general setting that says "Open GMail When I click on Email Links" - select that and exit.

This will set Gmail as your default mailto: handler. This means that when you click on any hyperlinked email address, a Gmail compose window will open in your default web browser. The To: address field will be prepopulated with email address.

This trick works if you are in IE - the GMail compose window would open inside Firefox. To make this work inside Firfox, implement this small change:


1. Type about:config in the address bar.
2. Type mailto: and hit enter.
3. You'll see a setting called network.protocol-handler.external.mailto that is set to false. Double click it to toggle the value to true.

How to Bring your Gmail Emails into Microsoft Outlook

John’s organization was earlier using Gmail for Google Apps but not that they have migrated to Microsoft Office, he would like to make the switch from Gmail to Microsoft Outlook. He is also looking to transfer all the old email messages from Gmail to Outlook on the desktop.

Microsoft Outlook is available for both Windows PC & Mac OS X and both versions can connect to your Gmail account and fetch your emails. You can either use POP3 or IMAP to access Gmail from Outlook though the latter is recommended as it allows 2-way sync.

Fetch your Gmail into Microsoft Outlook

Here’s how you can import email from Gmail to Microsoft Outlook. The technique works @gmail.com addresses and also Google Apps email accounts that use a custom domain like @example.com.

To get started, go to your Gmail Settings, click the Forwarding and POP / IMAP tab and Enable IMAP. Save your changes.

Next open Microsoft Outlook on your computer and go to Tools, Account Settings. Click the plus (+) symbol to add a new IMAP account to your Outlook. Here enter your Gmail account details as shown in the screenshot:

Put your full email address in the Username, enter the password, set the incoming Mail (IMAP) Server as imap.gmail.com and enable “Use SSL to connect.” The incoming server port should be set to 993.

For the outgoing email server, set the address as smtp.gmail.com, set the port as 465 and enable “Use SSL to connect.” Go to More options and choose Use Incoming Server Info for authentication.

That’s it. Outlook will begin downloading all emails from your Gmail account though this process may take a while to complete depending on the size of your Gmail mailbox.

Gmail uses labels while Outlook works around folders. During import, your Gmail labels will automatically be mapped to corresponding folders inside Outlook. Also, you have enabled 2-factor authentication inside your Google Account, you need to create an app-specific password and your regular Gmail password will not work.