: Instant and requires no extra software. You can save an individual email directly as a PDF and then copy the text.
Be careful with those "Download Gmail" chrome extensions. A lot of them ask for way too many permissions just to save a single thread as a text file. I usually just print to PDF and call it a day. Download gmail com txt
I used Google Takeout to grab my archive from 2015. It gives you an MBOX file, but I found a simple Python script to strip the HTML and save everything as clean .txt files. It’s the only way to feel like I actually "own" my data. : Instant and requires no extra software