Print mail including technical mail header (right click - mail header)?

For the detailed verification of e-mail communication a complete transfer protocol is required, which contains the mail header.

I have found no way to print a mail together with this header data in a PDF or to save it as a PDF.

How can I achieve this?

If you are asking about the complete header information as in the mail source, that is not a normal requirement in an email client. I don’t recall any other client offering that, but you could view the header (right-click > View Mail Header) and then copy it somewhere else to print.

It is a requirement that the legislature demands for proof of a transmitted e-mail. For an e-mail client in the business area, I would therefore regard this as a legitimate requirement and required ability.

I know that I can copy this together, so the question was whether there is an integrated solution for this.

No, eM Client does not offer that option, and I doubt you will find any email client that does. If someone wants proof, you could just forward them the received email as an attachment. That way, especially if the email is digitally signed, they would be able to detect if it is a true unaltered email.

TheBat! has a option, to display the header together with the mail.this can very simple printed.

My suggestion: use The Bat!

I do that, comparing both. This is part of the exploration wether emClient is a business aware client or just a less expensive outlook clone.

In some cases emClient steps into very profesional regions, in others it ́s functions are quite poor.

I suggest, that you should look on those comments from a professional point of view instead of hastingly defending emClient where there is no attack.

To be clear: if TheBat! would be a perfect solution, I would not spend my time in discussions regarding emClient.

Well, eM Client is not an Outlook clone, so you are wasting your time!

I found out by myself several weeks ago, that emClient is more than that. Therefore it is no waste of time.

What makes you so angry about a simple fact, that does not makes emClient less worth it?

I found a workarround:

  1. Select/Copy All inside mail
  2. Paste it into an editor
  3. Rightclick - View Mail Header
  4. Select/Copy all
  5. Paste it before the mail text in editor
  6. Print / save as PDF
    This is not perfect, because there is no documentation of attachements and they are not part of the extraction. Therefore as an new feature „PDF/A  export“ for leagally compliant long-term storage would be great. (I will place that as „idea“).

Yes, my initial comment on the subject was to copy it somewhere else and print it that way.

For storage of the email, simply use Save As. That saves the email and it’s attachments as an eml file, which is readable by any email client.

Please, be aware that as described the required result is a legally compliant backup of emails. Neither copying it by hand into an editor nor saving a mail into EML does fullfill this need.

The difference of my discription to your note is, that both – mail header and mail content have to be in a consecutive order in one document (together with a list of attachments, that miss in this construction. Manual modifications are prohibited for legal reasons).Of course, your initial tip can be developed in this direction, but the original problem is by no means solved.

The reference to PDF/A may still be too vague: pasting the parts together is a crutch that has only limited (or no) legal validity.

Common and legally accepted email archiving solutions in the UK use services like EMC SourceOne, which essentially just store a digital copy of your email. They can be implemented in different ways, grabbing the email directly from your server, by receiving a copy during send/receive, manually exporting emails to another device or cloud location, or a backup from your email client. Other than proprietary formats used by individual applications, eml or mbox are also acceptable formats. The law requires that these be saved for a minimum of 5 years.

But whatever the legal requirements are in your country, I think that the best option is for you to consult a legal professional. That would be a much better idea than trying to suggest some obscure and unrealistic requirements that the majority of users would never require.

This is no “obscure and unrealistic requirement”. It is the requirement of a legal professional.

Well it is obscure because it is unusual (certainly within the G7). It is unrealistic because it is not a normal function of email clients and would require extensive development for any of them to provide what your law requires.

What you need to do is give the legal requirements of your country for this to be useful. If you have difficulty understanding those requirements, then you need to consult a legal professional, who can clearly explain those requirements. It may be that the legal requirements of the UK in regard to archiving email are very similar but there is some misunderstanding.

So what are the actual legal requirements? Don’t try and explain them, just list them as required by the law.

I described them.

From what I can gather you are saying that for a legally compliant backup of emails, you need to be able to print to pdf the email body including all header information and extracted attachment content. In your idea post you further added that this pdf, with all attachments extracted from compressed files, needs to be saved in separate folders for each email. Correct?

If this is the requirement of the German government, then they are being completely unrealistic because there is no email client that can do that automatically, and to expect someone to do it manually for thousands of emails a company may receive in a day is ridiculous. I could understand that if there was some dispute, and evidence needed to be presented, that saving a few emails in this form would be more realistic. But certainly not for regular backup and archiving of emails. Actually, my first thought when reading your initial post was that this was a requirement for dispute resolution, because you said it was for detailed verification.

But then I was more confused because above you said that the pdf has no legal validity. So how are you required to save the email?

But anyway, I did some research on German Commercial Code and Tax Law, and I could find no stipulation that archived emails need to be stored outside of an email system, and they are specifically not required to be printed. So you should be able to just keep them inside eM Client or whatever email application you are using. I also read that tax related emails must be in a complete form, so saving as pdf with extracted attachments in a folder is not legal. Please confirm this with your legal counsel.

Speculation is not my thing, that is why I asked you to list your requirements. I went through everything that you have written and summarised it as follows:

For a legally compliant backup of emails, you need to be able to print to pdf the email body including all header information and extracted attachment content. In your idea post you further added that this pdf, with all attachments extracted from compressed files, needs to be saved in separate folders for each email.

I asked you to confirm this. From what you have written on this forum, is the above statement correct?

Please name these external tools that provide this functionality. Maybe they can be used alongside eM Client in some way, and that can solve your problem.

Don’t worry about the external tools. I found some applications that will work for you, irrespective of your email client:

MailArchiva. Though it does not store the emails as pdf, I think you will find that this can export to pdf pretty much how you want. https://www.mailarchiva.com

MailStore is also good and has a big market in Germany. https://www.mailstore.com/de/

Hope this helps.