A challenging question?

[Tim Chase]

On January 19, 2017, Karen Lewellen wrote:
> Actually, the printer friendly  edition of emails at google will
> produce fine text, and yes I can save the file with the p function.
> The challenge is, since this is court evidence, I must gather
> likely a couple  hundred of them.

Ah, that changes the game.  I'd go the route that Hart mentioned of
connecting to Gmail via IMAP and slurping your mail locally which
gives you the actual message body including all the headers.  From
both a forensic perspective and a "gather them up to submit for
evidence" perspective, having the actual messages (rather than a
print-out) is the ideal.

If you want bidirectionality (continuing to use Gmail while also
having things local and keeping them in sync), I recommend something
like "offlineimap" or "mbsync" to pull/sync the mail locally. Once
it's local you can use a number of tools to manipulate the mail,
whether Alpine or Mutt to read it interactively, or "notmuch" to
index it for fast searches.  And since they're just text-files, they
can be copied, linked, zipped up, and sent to whomever you need.

-tim