Replies missing from message saved to file

Question

As editor of a newsletter, I have a lot of email questions and answers with newsletter contributors. For obvious reasons I need to save these to file instead of returning to Outlook repeatedly.
My problem is that my Outlook 365 only saves the original email to the .eml file. If there is a question with an answer it only saves only the question, not the answer!
I have searched in Settings etc and haven't found any way to save the whole "conversation" instead of just the first email. I have also searched the Web for anyone else having the same problem.

It seems to me that saving the whole message (as seen when opened) should be the default, or at least an accessible option.

My only workaround is to print to PDF, and that prints everything. BUT then I have ANOTHER problem - I can't copy/paste text from the PDF. (Regardless of which PDF viewer I use).

Answer 1

Hi Glen Thompson,

In New Outlook, Save as .eml always saves only the currently selected message; there’s no option to export an entire conversation as a single .eml file.

If you save the latest reply and that message includes the quoted history in the body, the resulting .eml can effectively contain the full conversation in one file (often the cleanest “one file per thread” approach). Another easy option is to forward the thread to yourself so the full conversation appears in the forwarded body, then save that forwarded email as an .eml.

If you prefer PDF but can’t copy/paste text, the PDF is likely being created as an image-based (rasterized) PDF. Two things that often help:

1. Print using “Microsoft Print to PDF” In the print dialog, choose Microsoft Print to PDF (rather than “Save as PDF” or other PDF printers). This can sometimes preserve selectable text.
2. Use Word as a text‑rescue step: Open the conversation > Ctrl+A then Ctrl+C > paste into Word > Save As > PDF. Word usually produces a text‑based PDF, allowing normal text selection and copying.

If you let me know whether you prefer one file per conversation or one file per message, I can suggest the fastest workflow for your archive setup.

Please let me know if this proves useful to you, or if you would like further assistance.

I'm looking forward to your reply.

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Answer 2

Outlook saves exactly one message per .eml file: the item that is selected when choosing Save as. It does not export the entire conversation thread into a single .eml, and there is no setting in Outlook to change this behavior or to “include replies” when saving to .eml.

To preserve a full Q&A thread as individual .eml files, each message in the conversation must be saved separately:

1. In Outlook, open the conversation and switch to the view that shows all messages in the thread.
2. Select a message in the thread.
3. Use More actions > Save as (or right‑click the message and choose Save as) to save that specific message as an .eml file.
4. Repeat for each reply that needs to be archived.

Alternatively, to keep the thread together inside Outlook instead of on disk, the whole conversation can be moved or copied into a dedicated Outlook folder (for example, one folder per newsletter issue) using standard move/copy operations. See “Move or copy an item to another folder” from the referenced article for details.

For now, printing to PDF (which captures the on‑screen view of the entire message, including quoted content) or saving each message in the conversation individually are the available options; Outlook does not provide a built‑in way to save an entire multi‑message conversation into a single .eml file.

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References:

• Save an Outlook message as a .eml file, a PDF file, or as a draft