I suspect this is an issue with Thunderbird's printing. I occasionally see the same when printing HTML formatted messages; an empty page with "about:blank" and other bits of headers and footers. I think the fact that it shows up with PDF is a bit of a red herring.

If I am desperate to print it (which is quite rare) then I'd copy'n'paste the content to Word and print from there. Or yank out the HTML code into its own new HTML document and then view and print it in my browser.

But I haven't yet been able to identify any particular feature of these messages so can't reproduce it at will to raise a bug report.

A thought. There is a "hidden feature" in Thunderbird in that if you select part of the text of a message then print, it prints only the selected part. I wonder if you were to select the whole message (ctrl+a) before printing this might provoke it into working correctly?

Thanks, Zenos. Both of your replies give me food for thought and some focus on where to do a little experimenting. After that, I'll post what I learned, if anything. I don't want to say it's solved until I dig a little deeper.

After some further research: the best workaround for this issue for me (using Ubuntu 14.04 and Thunderbird 45.5.1) seems to be to simply open the .eml file with Libre Office Writer and then print with CUPS-pdf printer. I also found that opening with a text editor like Gedit (native to Ubuntu) or Notepad worked pretty much the same. I can also open the .eml file in Thunderbird and then go to “Message” on the toolbar and then “Edit As New Message” to get the email, but when I print it, I only get the body of the message and nothing else (like From: To: Subject, Time etc).

More study revealed that Thunderbird messages saved as .eml files are actually MHTML format (short for MIME HTML). To then convert them to .pdf one needs a printer that is capable of doing that. Apparently there is a shareware pdf printer called “novapdf” that will create .pdf from MHTML in various versions of Windows, but not in Linux distros. Trying to find the Linux equivalent of “novapdf” might be an exercise in futility. For me, the workaround above will be just fine and equals SOLVED.

If you are looking to convert .eml to .pdf format than you need to prefer a third party tool EML to PDF Converter which can efficiently export EML data into PDF format without any error. For More Info: -

Jon, While Zook eml converter may be a worthy product and worth $149 to a company or $49 to a home Windows user, it really doesn't fit into the spirit of Linux open-source software. (Notice that my problem involves Thunderbird on Ubuntu.) My solution posted above works fine and is $49 cheaper. But it's probably good that you offered a link to it and let users decide if the cost is worth it for their uses.