widgets acme inc. has been in business for over 10 years and has exchanged emails with thousands of customers and vendors. emails are perfectly archived in gmail but most email addresses are not stored in google contacts. the company is now changing offices and they need to inform everyone by email about the office change.
The big task ahead is to extract all these email addresses from the gmail mailbox and download them in a format, like csv, which can be easily imported into google address book or a mailing list service like mailchimp .
Introducing Email Address Extractor, a google addon that scans all the emails in your gmail account, extracts the email addresses, and saves them to a google spreadsheet. works for both gmail and google apps accounts.
The extractor can extract email addresses from a particular gmail folder (label) or from the entire mailbox. You can choose to extract the emails from the sender, the recipients and those in the cc list. the plugin can also scan the email subject and message body for email addresses. this is useful for extracting generic sender addresses, such as paypal emails or contact forms, where the email addresses are in the body of the message.
how to extract email addresses in gmail
you can follow the step by step guide or watch the video tutorial on youtube (download) to get started:
- Install the gmail extractor plugin and grant the necessary permissions. the plugin needs access to your gmail and also google drive to save the email list inside a google spreadsheet.
- go to the plugins menu inside the google spreadsheet, choose extract the email address and click start to start the extractor plugin.
- specify the search criteria and the extractor will analyze all emails that match the rule. you can use any of gmail’s search operators to filter messages.
- then select the fields (to, from, cc, bcc) that should be parsed to extract emails (screenshot). the plugin can also extract sender and recipient names if they are available within the message header.
click the “start” button and the extractor will start extracting emails into the spreadsheet. The whole process may take some time depending on the size of your gmail mailbox.
FAQ about gmail extractor
google sheet must remain open and the computer must be online during the extraction. if the connection is lost, or if the extraction process is interrupted for any reason, you can simply click the “resume” button and the extractor will continue where it left off.
if you go back to gmail, you will find a new tag called extracted. this keeps track of which emails have been processed and you can safely remove this tag after all email addresses have been parsed and extracted.
The google spreadsheet created by the email extraction plugin has two sheets: all emails & unique emails. The first sheet includes all the emails found in your gmail account while the second sheet is a clean list with no duplicate emails. this is the sheet you should use to create your address book.
The free version of the plugin has all the features, but only extracts addresses from up to 500 email threads (one thread contains multiple emails). the premium version (link) imposes no such restriction and entitles you to 90 days of free support.
internally, it’s a google script that uses regular expression magic to get email addresses from gmail. The extracted email addresses are saved in a google spreadsheet which can be used as input to send personalized emails via gmail mail merge.
see also: schedule emails in gmail to send later