Create a PDF of an email on an iPhone 6s

Emails sent and received by an attorney are not just a form of communication.  Sometimes, they are themselves evidence.  Thus, attorneys often have a need to turn an email into a document, typically a PDF document.  I am frequently asked if it is possible to create a PDF version of an email on the iPhone or iPad.  I typically use Microsoft Outlook on my computer to do this (printing to a virtual PDF printer), but if you need to do it on an iOS device, it is currently possible to do so … but only if you are using an iPhone 6s (or an iPhone 6s Plus).  The reason for that limitation is that this method requires the use of 3D Touch, which is only available on those new models.  Here is how you do it.

1. Select the print option for the email

The first step is to open the email in question and select the print option.  In my example, I’ve selected an email of the BlawgWorld newsletter from TechnoLawyer.  With my email selected, I next tap the arrow at the bottom of the screen.  This causes a menu to pop up.  Just below Reply and Forward, you will see an option to Print.  Tap Print.

 

2. 3D Touch the preview

After you tap Print you will see a screen with Printer Options.  You can ignore everything on the top half of the screen, including the Print button.  Instead, just pay attention to the bottom of the screen, which shows you a preview of what it would look like if you printed the email.  You can swipe left and right to see how many pages it would be.

Everything I have showed you so far works on all iPhones and iPads, but what you next need to do only currently works on the iPhone 6s or iPhone 6s Plus:  3D Touch on the image of the print preview.  When you first push harder on the screen, you will see the preview pop up.  (I wasn’t able to take a screenshot of this action.)  When the preview pops up, push down even harder.  That will open up the preview image into its own PDF file, which looks like this:

3. Export the PDF file

The final step is to act upon the PDF file that you just created.  Tap the action button at the top right (the box with the arrow pointing up).  That gives you all of the normal options that you see when you are working with a PDF file.  For example, you can email the PDF file, open the PDF file into one of the many apps that can handle PDF files, save the PDF file to your Dropbox, etc.

That’s it.  Now you have a PDF version of your email.

The future

There may currently be ways to turn an email into a PDF file using a third party email app, but I don’t know about it.  [UPDATE:  A comment to this post points out the at the Spark app includes this feature, and I just confirmed this in a test with my Gmail account.]  I tend not to use those apps with my work email because many of the apps require transferring my emails to a third party server, which makes me worried about confidentiality and security.  For now, the above method is the only way to create a PDF version of an email using the built-in Mail app. 

[UPDATE:  A reader emailed me to suggest taking a screenshot while you are looking at an email.  Then you can use any PDF app to convert that image to a PDF file.  I didn’t mention this when I first wrote this post because you will need to stitch together multiple screenshots to make this work, unless it is a really short email, so this is a far from elegant solution.  But it might work in a pinch.]

In the future, we will have more devices with 3D Touch — certainly more iPhones, and perhaps iPads too.  But my hope is that Apple also creates a way to make this procedure work even if you are using an older device that doesn’t have 3D Touch.  Apple will announce the next version of iOS in just a few weeks, at its developer conference called WWDC which takes place June 13 to 17, 2016 in San Francisco.  Perhaps we will see this announced soon, and available when the next iOS update comes out in a few months.  We’ll see.

For now, if you are using a new iPhone that supports 3D Touch, you already have the power to turn an email into a PDF document.