How to Save an Email to a Folder
Most email providers let you simply drag the message directly into the folder of your choice. Others, that don’t support drag-and-drop, most likely have a menu that you can access to move the message elsewhere. This is true for both online clients and downloadable ones. For example, with Gmail and Outlook Mail, in addition to drag-and-drop, you can use the Move to menu to select an appropriate folder to move the message into. Yahoo! and Mail.com work the same way except that the move menu is just called Move. With AOL Mail, it’s in the More > Move to menu. With most providers, moving email into folders can be done in bulk so that you don’t have to select each individual message on their own. With Gmail, for instance, you can search for specific keywords or email addresses within your mail, and then select all of them to quickly move lots of email into a separate folder.
How to Move Email Messages Automatically
Even better, some providers let you automatically save emails to a folder using filters. You can see how to do that if follow these links to the instructions for Gmail, Microsoft Outlook, Outlook.com, Yahoo!, and GMX Mail. Other providers not listed here have similar settings, such as Mail.com’s Settings > Filter Rules menu option or AOL Mail’s Options > Mail Settings > Filters Settings page.
How to Download Email to Your Computer
Saving messages to a folder might also mean saving them to a folder on your computer, instead of within the mail client. This is definitely possible for individual emails but may not be for bulk messages, nor does it always work the same with each provider or is a definite feature supported by every email service. For any email provider, you can, of course, print the page of the email to get an offline copy of it. You might also be able to use a built-in print/save function to download the message to your computer. For example, with a Gmail message open, you can use the menu to choose Show original, which gives you a Download Original button to save the message as a TXT file. To download every single Gmail message you have (or just ones marked with certain labels), use Google’s Takeout feature. Though it isn’t exactly the same as Gmail, if you’re using Outlook.com, it’s really easy to save an email to OneNote, which then downloads to the same OneNote app on your desktop or mobile device. Another option with any email service is to set it up with an offline email client so that once the messages are saved to your computer, you can export them to a single file for archival purposes, or just have them on your computer in case it goes offline. This offline email process is similar to the built-in feature offered to Gmail users, called Google Offline.
