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MS Outlook Email to PDF for Efficient Transaction Email Archives

By James Kimmons, About.com

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  • Email is here to stay. We all are relying more every day on email to correspond with our clients in their real estate transactions. It's not uncommon for there to be hundreds of emails from and to dozens of entities involved in a real estate deal.

  • You MUST keep all emails! The federal government requires email records in pre-trial discovery. Since a great deal of our business is governed by the EPA, HUD, and other federal agencies, it's not that far-fetched to assume that you might be in a federal court some day. Being accused of "virtual shredding" because you can't provide email records would not be pleasant.

  • Easy archiving with Acrobat. Printing each and every email sent or received to a .pdf document at the time is not feasible. So, it's nice that Adobe Acrobat's software installs a button in MS Outlook to convert selected emails or an entire folder at once. If you convert the transaction folder, the resulting .pdf document allows you to select sorting by date, sender or recipient. It's fast, readable by nearly every computer on the planet, and you can put it onto a CD or DVD for long term storage separate from your hard drive.

  • Corral those agent emails too. If you've got individual agents doing emails for transactions outside a network or intranet, you can get a handle on this. By creating rules in their system to copy and/or forward all emails to your office system, you can then get them into proper format and archive them. You can just add an extra step to the rules the agent creates for filing the email in the transaction folder {flash video how-to's}. In the videos you see how to create the filing rules in the agent's Outlook. Just add a step into the rules to forward a copy to your office account.
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