Exporting from Vault

[NickD]

We have a need to export all emails from a specific user's mailbox. I understand that Vault allows me to export as PST or MBOX files. However, these do not really help much in this situation. Does anyone know if there's a way to export all a user's messages as a PDF File to make it easier for the recipient of the request to read? Thanks!

[KAM]

@NickD there is nothing native for this use case but you could export to MBOX and use tools like (https://macwaretools.com/blog/convert-mbox-files-to-pdf-documents/) to convert.  You could also import back into Google and use a Google Apps Script to convert the email to a PDF.

-KAM

[Stephane_fr]

Hi

With a tool like onleemigration you can move emailin Gmail inbox to a Google Groups. Then you share the Google Groups to the users and they can search/read emails.

When work is done you delete groups and all emails are deleted.

https://workspace.google.com/marketplace/app/onleemigration/92524179685

Stéphane

[KevinApodaca]

What is the end goal ? You mention that you need to make it "easier for the recipient of the request to read." If this is a legal investigation, you could consider instead creating a Matter in Google Vault, and providing that individual limited access to the emails in that matter. 

When you export from Vault most customers are generally doing this to put it into some other system for legal investigation (tools like Relativity) and thus are not meant for viewing as PDFs.

An alternative approach would be to, as an admin, log in to the user's account and run a Google Takeout export for the mail data, you'll still get an MBOX format and will still need to solve for what you're doing to do with it, but you can look into opening this file in something like Mozilla Thunderbird, Apple's Mail Client, or Outlook.