# Best Way to Save Gmail Emails as PDF + Reply from FileMaker?

**URL:** <https://the.fmsoup.org/t/best-way-to-save-gmail-emails-as-pdf-reply-from-filemaker/4800>\
**Category:** Questions\
**Tags:** integration\
**Created:** [April 7, 2025, 4:08pm UTC](https://the.fmsoup.org/t/best-way-to-save-gmail-emails-as-pdf-reply-from-filemaker/4800 "2025-04-07T16:08:15Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 6\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Drew](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b19c9b/32.png) [@Drew](https://the.fmsoup.org/u/Drew)\
**Post date:** [April 7, 2025, 4:08pm UTC](https://the.fmsoup.org/t/best-way-to-save-gmail-emails-as-pdf-reply-from-filemaker/4800/1 "2025-04-07T16:08:15Z")

</div>

I’m brainstorming a bit here and wanted to throw this out to the community.

I’ve built a script that makes a Gmail API call—it grabs an email by ID, and inserts the subject and body as a note in our FileMaker database. So far that part works great.

Now I’m thinking about taking it further:

- I’d like to **save the email contents as a PDF** , maybe using a nice print layout in FileMaker.
- Then I’d like to **reply to the email** , ideally using FileMaker’s native `Send Mail` script step or something similar.
- The goal is to store the original email first, then reply from FileMaker and maintain the thread if possible.

My question is— **is there a better way to integrate Gmail with FileMaker** for this kind of workflow? Has anyone done something like this? Or is there a smarter approach I haven’t thought of?

Any ideas or experiences would be really appreciated!

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Malcolm](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/flex030/user_avatar/the.fmsoup.org/malcolm/32/196_2.png) [@Malcolm](https://the.fmsoup.org/u/Malcolm)\
**Post date:** [April 7, 2025, 8:16pm UTC](https://the.fmsoup.org/t/best-way-to-save-gmail-emails-as-pdf-reply-from-filemaker/4800/2 "2025-04-07T20:16:32Z")

</div>

Stupid question: Why not leave all the work to Gmail and view in a web viewer?

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Drew](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b19c9b/32.png) [@Drew](https://the.fmsoup.org/u/Drew)\
**Post date:** [April 7, 2025, 8:22pm UTC](https://the.fmsoup.org/t/best-way-to-save-gmail-emails-as-pdf-reply-from-filemaker/4800/3 "2025-04-07T20:22:14Z")

</div>

Good point... The company thinks it would be cool not to have employees go through the gmail website.  
They imagine getting an email from a customer, then saving that email and our response. Then send a slack message to an employee for them to response, while never really leaving filemaker & slack

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Malcolm](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/flex030/user_avatar/the.fmsoup.org/malcolm/32/196_2.png) [@Malcolm](https://the.fmsoup.org/u/Malcolm)\
**Post date:** [April 7, 2025, 11:02pm UTC](https://the.fmsoup.org/t/best-way-to-save-gmail-emails-as-pdf-reply-from-filemaker/4800/4 "2025-04-07T23:02:30Z")

</div>

There are email plugins that take the pain out of this. I'd go straight there. Divide the cost of the plugin by your hourly wage to discover the time it will take to break even on ROI 😄

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Drew](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b19c9b/32.png) [@Drew](https://the.fmsoup.org/u/Drew)\
**Post date:** [April 8, 2025, 1:36pm UTC](https://the.fmsoup.org/t/best-way-to-save-gmail-emails-as-pdf-reply-from-filemaker/4800/5 "2025-04-08T13:36:52Z")

</div>

hahaha! Great, thank you!

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Drew](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b19c9b/32.png) [@Drew](https://the.fmsoup.org/u/Drew)\
**Post date:** [April 29, 2025, 2:46pm UTC](https://the.fmsoup.org/t/best-way-to-save-gmail-emails-as-pdf-reply-from-filemaker/4800/6 "2025-04-29T14:46:39Z")

</div>

MBS for the win!

MBS("WebView.RenderPDF"; "WebViewer"; "FM.PDF")