help a newb out with e-mail extraction

6 replies
Hello, glad to be on board here.

Long story short, I lost my contacts from an old e-mail but I have their e-mail/details in the body of invoices that I forwarded to my current e-mail.
I've been copying thousands of these emails out out by hand, but man the carpal tunnel is creeping in my wrist. Does anyone know of an easier way to do this? :confused:

Autohotkey might be an option to extract, but before I go down that route, what is the best place to initially save that extracted information for list building? In desktop e-mail software, gmail contacts, a text file, excel? Keeping in mind I'll have to e-mail them directly to opt-in again then I'll use aweber or something so I'd like to get this data somewhere easy to populate and export to other places from the beginning. Many thanks
#email #extraction #newb
  • Profile picture of the author capedape1
    Looks like nobody is biting on that first part, how about the second:

    What is the most flexible place to save extracted contact information for list building, given I have on idea what list software I'll be using? I'm currently saving e-mails/addresses to a text file which I think might be a mistake given I'm going to have to add all this information back to google contacts so I can mail them directly for another opt-in. Unless there is software that will populate gmail contacts from a text file?

    I'm guessing a .CSV file would be much better given I can import that data to gmail's contacts?

    Thanks!=
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    • Profile picture of the author Gail_Curran
      Hi,
      I don't know any better options than copying and pasting the info from the invoice to the new location. I was going to suggest outsourcing the task but you probably don't want to hand over client data to a stranger.

      But I'd certainly suggest using Excel to store the data. Then you can export the data in whatever format you want, including csv. Obviously you'd use one row per client and one column for each piece of data (email, name, etc.)
      .
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  • Profile picture of the author Sillysoft
    What format are the invoices in? PDF/Word/Excel?
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  • Profile picture of the author NatureGal
    Save yourself from Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. Do a google search for Email Extractor.
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    • Profile picture of the author capedape1
      what I ended up doing was installing this extension for thunderbird called
      "importexportool"

      It lets you:

      - export of folder in a single file (mbox format), with also the subfolders if you want;
      - export of all messages in single files (eml format);
      - export of all messages in single files (html or plain text format), with an index;
      - export of all messages in one single plain text file;
      - export of index of the messages in a folder (HTML or CSV format); - mbox files import;
      - eml files import;
      - import of all the eml files existing in a directory;

      I'll use autohotkey or maybe that e-mail extractor (thanks) to narrow down the info I need. Hope this helps someone else out there.
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  • Profile picture of the author hustlinsmoke
    If it was me I would head to vworker or scriptlance and pay someone about 20 bucks to extract them.
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