Learn how to extract email addresses and names from email messages in your Gmail account and import email directories into Google Contacts or Outlook Address Book.
A fintech startup is gearing up to host its first networking event for professionals within the industry. During their journey, the company has engaged in email communications with industry experts, partners, and customers. Now, they aim to match a directory of these email addresses to send personalized email invitations.
The primary challenge is extracting all these email addresses from the company’s Gmail account and downloading them into a compatible format like CSV, which can be easily imported into a mailing list service like Google Contacts or MailChimp.
This is where an email address extractor can help. This is a Google add-on that sifts through all email messages in a company’s Gmail account, extracts email addresses and saves them in a Google spreadsheet. It works with both Gmail and Google Workspace accounts.
The Gmail Address Extractor add-on can extract email addresses from specific Gmail folders (labels), last sent or received emails. n month, or for the entire mailbox.
You can choose to extract sender and recipient email addresses, including those in the CC field. Additionally, it can parse email subject lines and message bodies and extract email addresses from text. This is useful for extracting addresses, say from PayPal invoices, where the buyer’s email address is often written in the body of the message.
You can follow a step-by-step guide on how to extract email addresses from Gmail messages using the Email Address Extractor add-on.
- Install the Gmail Extractor add-on and grant the required permissions. The add-on requires access to Gmail and Google Sheets to save extracted email addresses.
- Launch the add-on within your Google Spreadsheet and specify search criteria. You can use Gmail search operators and any matching emails will be processed by the extractor.
- Next, select one or more message fields (to, from, cc, bcc) that should be parsed to extract emails. The add-on can also pull the names of senders and recipients if they are available within the email header.
Click on Save and Run Option to extract all email addresses from emails matching specified criteria. The whole process may take some time depending on the size of your Gmail mailbox.
The extracted email addresses will be stored in the current spreadsheet. You will notice that two sheets have been added to your active Google Sheet.
The first sheet contains a list of all unique email addresses that have been extracted from the matching emails. The second sheet contains the complete details of processed emails. This includes the message date, sender details, subject line and a link to the original email message in Gmail.
The Google Sheet must remain open and the computer must be online at the time of withdrawal. If the connection is lost, or the extraction process is interrupted for some reason, you can click the “Restart” button and the extractor will pick up where it already left off, avoiding the need to start the whole process again.
The add-on applies the extracted title label to all processed and extracted emails. If you want to re-extract email addresses from the same set of emails, you can remove the label from the emails and run the extractor again.
Internally, it’s a Google Script that uses the magic of regular expressions to pull email addresses from Gmail. Extracted email addresses are saved in a Google spreadsheet that can later be exported to Google Contacts or Outlook.