I recently had occasion to want to print out a bunch of email message chains that would contain the PDFs that are attachments to some of the messages, printed in the chain after the specific message the PDF was attached to.
Having been one of those Mac users since 1984 its rare that I run across something “simple” like this that the Mac can’t handle.
Documentation makes it clear that Mac mail (and apparently Gmail through Mimestream) ignore the attaachments when printing.
I’ce tried using ChatGPT/Perplexity/Claude to come up with automation scripts for this, but after a few hours chatting with my new AI friends, nothing worked. Nor can the AIs suggest a utility with this capability.
This is so fundamental to electronic documents – being able to make a complete paper record of the coorespondance – that I’m baffled that it isn’t built in. But given that its not, can anyone suggest a solution?
The reason I use electronic documents is so I don’t have to deal with paper. Generally is such cases the attachment has all the information so I just save that. In the rare cases the Email message is important I just save it as a pdf along with the attachment.
I’ve been leading a paperless lifestyle for over a dozen years and in all that time I’ve never needed a paper copy.
I also have occasion to print things now and then and tried to imagine how I would handle this.
The first and yes uncomfortable solution I can think of is to print in sequence, one at a time.
I looked in my Mail app and ⌘-p created a preview on the left of an email with photos attached but the photos were chopped at page breaks.
Email with pdf, sure enough, was only the email.
Tried Message > Forward as Attachment but again only the text.
I tried to get a pdf attachment to even display inline and couldn’t do it. There is a download attachment next to the icon of the file but it only offers where to download it.
Contextual clicking I thought maybe Open With would offer Pages, where you could copy-paste text and attachment but Pages is not in the list.
Preview should allow opening the pdfs and adding the email content (File > Export as pdf) as a pdf.
Contextual Menu Share > contains Notes and from what I’ve read Notes can display text and other stuff inline.
I looked in the printer settings to see if there was an option to include attachments and for my Brother inkjet there was no such option, maybe yours has it.
Looked briefly in Joe Kissell’s new Take Control of Mail ebook and didn’t find a solution straight away. Searched for “print” in the pdf and only found 7 results, none relevant, but there might be a solution tucked away in there.
There’s not even a Share… command in the Message menu, or in the context menu for the body or header of the email. So I can’t figure out how to get the email into Notes along with the pdf.
Sigh. Um. Got to rush off on an important errand. Interested to find a solution!
I just tried selecting the body of the email, including a PDF attachment, copying it and pasting it into a new Word document. No sign of the PDF! Same with pasting (paste-ing) into Pages.
It seems the copy command ignores attachments.
Interesting problem, though I can see it might be difficult to create a general solution that can print any attachment, e.g., media files, zip archives, etc.
I don’t have a definitive solution for hardcopies, but here are some ideas that may be worth exploring:
I’m pretty sure that some professional-level legal archive/discovery tools can create email dumps that include printable attachments, but they tend to be expensive and Windows-only. Perhaps some Mac mail archiving tools, like Mail Archiver X, would offer related capability. Note that the Mail Archiver developer offers a discount to TidBITS members.
I also recall that old versions of Outlook for Windows allowed users to print selected emails and printable attachments through the Windows print dialog. I don’t know if the “modern” Outlook for Windows will do that. The Mac version definitely doesn’t.
Depending on the volume of attachments, it may make sense simply to download them, print them, and then manually insert them into the final hardcopy. For example, the Mac version of Outlook will let you select messages with attachments and then bulk download them to a single folder. From there, you could select all of the documents and print them from the Finder. Still a bit of manual operation to slide the printed attachments into the rest of the emails, but maybe not too bad.
Good suggestions; thanks. I can certainly do the physical print-and-paginate process, but even though I don’t have a huge need for this, I’m “offended” that the system won’t do something so obviously necessary.
Something I’ve noticed with email attachments that could make a “print email + attachments” option complicated is that many emails have their embedded graphics—such as logos and contact info—sent as attachments, not as files retrieved from a server.
