How To Print Emails and Attachments in Microsoft Outlook

Printing emails is important when you need a hard copy. In Outlook there are two ways to do this, depending on if you want to print a single email or a group of emails. If you continue reading, we’ll also tell you how to print an email attachment. To print a single email, follow these instructions:

How to print email in Outlook:

Open the email you want to print
Choose File … Print
In the Print dialog that shows up, choose your options then click Ok

Note that if you check the box to print attachments, they will print to the default printer only. Printing many emails is accomplished by following these instructions:

How to print multiple emails in Outlook:

In the main Outlook window, select the emails you want to save
Choose File … Print
In the Print Dialog that shows up, choose your options then click Ok

Note that you can print emails in table style instead of memo style, which gives you the From recipient, Subject and other details in a concise format.

Outlook can also print emails as they come in by using rules. To do this, follow these instructions:

How to print emails using rules in Outlook:

In the main Outlook window, choose Home…Rules…Create rule
Select all the conditions you need to filter only the emails you need to print, then click Next
Then click the Advanced Options button, then click Next
Check Print it, then click Next
Add any exceptions, then click Next
Give the rule a name, then click Finish

Outlook makes it easy to print emails but it is sometimes limited. For instance Outlook only prints attachments to the default printer, printing of emails and attachments sometimes is out of order, sent emails cannot be printed automatically, and emails (and attachments) cannot be printed automatically to non-default printers. To correct all these problems, an add-in like our Auto Print must be used. To automatically print emails and/or attachments, follow these instructions:

How to automatically print emails and/or attachments using Auto Print:

Click on the Sperry Software icon in the main Outlook toolbar
Click on the add-in’s “AutoPrint Incoming Email” tab
Choose an Outlook folder to watch (like the Inbox)
Choose the appropriate filters, or all incoming emails
Choose what to print, either emails, attachments, or both
On the Print Settings tab, select the printer

Note that with the add-in, you can select the Sent Items folder as well, which effectively prints sent emails (which has the advantage that you can print the email header information). Also, you can control which pages get printed, how many copies to print, or which types of attachments get printed (for instance, just PDF files).

The add-in also prints emails in batch. Similar to when they are printed automatically as they arrive, to print an entire folder follow these instructions: