Extracting Email Address from Outlook 2007 folder

Extracting Email Address from Outlook 2007 folder

So you have a folder that you keep all your sales inquiries. From out of nowhere, you are instructed to send each person an email with your company’s new catalog. Panic!
The thought of having to manually go through each email and copy and paste the email address is nauseating and you wonder how many sick days you have left this year…

Before you reach for the phone to call HR, I have a solution for you!

[Update 24 July 2012 – you can get the new solution that extracts email address from folders and subfolders too]

Here are the steps to extract the Email Address from Outlook 2007 folder:

  1. In Outlook 2007, click on File, Import and Export and the Wizard opens up.
  2. Select the option to Export to a File and click on Next
  3. Next, select Microsoft Excel 97-2003 (or a CSV file) and click on Next
  4. Chose the folder that your sales inquiries reside in and click on Next
  5. Click on Browse to select a location and then type the file name that you want to export the information to and then click on Next
  6. Here is the important bit – click on Map Custom Fields. This will bring up a list of all the available fields that are available in that folder.
    Since we are only interested in Email address, click on Clear Map and then from the Left side click on From: (address) and drag that to the Right list
  7. Click on OK
  8. Click on Finish

Now watch the magic happen – all the Email addresses will be exported neatly into an Excel spreadsheet that you can now manipulate and use as you wish !

This is also available on YouTube for a step by step tutorial:

 

[Bonus Material: How to remove duplicates from the Excel file]

 

Liron Segev - TheTechieGuy

Liron Segev is an award-winning tech blogger, YouTube strategist, and Podcaster. He helps brands tell their stories in an engaging way that non-techies can relate to. He also drinks way too much coffee! @Liron_Segev on Twitter

114 thoughts on “Extracting Email Address from Outlook 2007 folder

  1. Great tip. So simple and works.
    I was looking for some dedicated software to do it and nothing worked well. Finally i found it and was surprised that it was so obvious.
    Thanks a lot!

  2. good god – I have looked everywhere for doing this and was being directed to do everything from creating macros to buying software.

  3. Wow. I’ve actually spent hours copying emails….this is unbelievable….thanks so much for posting your knowledge.

  4. Brilliant!! OMG I so love the simple things that work but always look for the biggest sledgehammer to crack the problem. Thank you for saving me heaps of time and effort. You rock!

  5. Excelent bit of information! Thank you. I have 1 problem though, my folder that contains all the email addresses is also neatly divided up into hundreds of more folders, one for each person/company. I tried the method listed above but this only extracts addresses from the folder I select, not the folders within! Can anyone help me out on how to include the folders within?
    Many Thanks,
    Dan

  6. I’m looking for something that can pull email addresses out of the bodies of messages residing in an Outlook folder.

    For example: I get a bunch of bounces from aol, but the email address that is bad is located in the message body.

    Any tip for that?

  7. That was Awesome! Thank you:) I have figured out how to get your addresses matched with names in COLUMNS:
    1. Export as tab (windows)
    2. In the text file, manually ENTER at the end of each section (once at the end of to:names or cc:names for example, then again at the end of to: addresses or cc: addresses)
    3. Copy from this text file ONLY the data lines, not the column headers
    4. PASTE into Excel
    5. COPY in Excel the ROWs you just pasted
    6. PASTE again somewhere below (or a new worksheet) with a PASTE SPECIAL, TRANSPOSE
    7. Now you have columns with names(alias) that match their addresses

  8. What a fantastic and simple solution to a difficult problem I had! Thank you!
    It will save a lot of time, though I do want to extract the body text (a series of fields with data) into their own columns, at some point in the future. Example
    contact_phone:
    contact_zipcode:
    contact_name: etc

  9. I’m also looking for an answer to this.

    Up to now, the only way I’ve been able to do it is by creating a copy of the master folder and then drag all the emails into a single folder, then run the process described.

    It takes a while but is still much quicker than C+P to a separate folder….

  10. THANK YOU!! I hate that I have to use Outlook at work and dealing with all my newsletter unsubs is grueling. Can’t believe this tip isn’t plastered all over the place. You saved the day!!

  11. Hi all,
    Looks like this is something that Microsoft should make easier for everyone !

    Glad I could help so many people and thank you for the positive comments and feedback.

    Have a great festive season and all the best for 2011 !

  12. Great response and very helpful. I have one similar problem I just can’t find a resolution to …. In one of my outlook folders I have many hundreds of emails many have attachments – I want to extract all the attachments into a folder (not an outlook folder). I can do this but only one at a time. Is there any way of selecting a bunch of emails and extracting all the attachments at once?

  13. genius !! i had been searching for address extractor for two days. i am surprised at the simplicity of the final result. thanks a lot.

    by the way. is it possible to extract sender’s name alongwith the email address?

  14. Hi,
    To extract sender’s name along with the email address all you have to do if follow the steps above.
    Except when you get to this step also add the info in bold below.
    •Here is the important bit – click on Map Custom Fields. This will bring up a list of all the available fields that are available in that folder.
    Since we are only interested in Email address, click on Clear Map and then from the Left side click on From: (address) and drag that to the Right list
    from the Left side click on From:(name) and drag that to the Right list
    continue as above.

    You will then see in your XLS file:

    FromName FromAddress
    Liron Segev [email protected]

    Hope this helps !

  15. Works awesome.
    Only bummer is I spent so much time to organize the emails into sub folders have to run a few times.
    With the multiple to, or cc I copied these columns to a new worksheet.
    Select Data then Text to Columns, delimeter of ; and you will seperate the long string to individual columns for each of the to addresses, same for cc
    Going to try the file extract next.

  16. Thank you! You saved me hundreds of work hours and I was able to build my mailout list to import into my email marketing software. MANY MANY thanks.

  17. Man, you are the man…saved my day….was trying to download so many softwares to extract email IDs from my outlook 2007……Excellent work, bro…keep it up !!!

  18. Glad I could help !
    not sure I am following the part about “is there anyway by which I can prevent same address from copying again and again” ?
    If you are asking is there a way for the export to only export unique email address – I am afraid the answer is nope…
    What you can do is deduplicate the exported list in Excel.

  19. It is not working for me… I follow the procedure, but at the end I get a file that only has the words “From (Address)” in it.

    In other words, it has the name of the field, but not the email addresses.

    Help.

  20. Worked now! I was importing from Inbox, which is what I wanted, but my Outlook has two Inboxes, since I am using it to pull from a remote server. In the list of Folders you can choose from when you are exporting, only the original Inbox shows! So the only way I could make it work was to move all my messages into the official Inbox. Weird.

  21. I’m wondering if anyone knows how to export bounceback email addresses from outlook. I keep doing mail merges and get a million bouncebacks and have to go through one by one and flag them in my excel spreadsheet. If anyone has advice they will be saving my life!!

    Jen

  22. This also worked on Outlook 2010 with an added step. After Outlook Options opens up, you click on Advanced and then export.

  23. Thanks for a brilliant articles. I was hoping you could help me a bit further though please? I was wanting to somehow extract an email address when it is contained in the body part of an email too. So if say someone you knows mentions another person’s email address in their message you can export that or more likely for when your host tells you an email message has failed to deliver you can extract the bad email address from their message out to Excel or Access. I want to run an un-matched query against my address book and the bad email addresses to get rid of them and clean things up a bit. Any help would be great

  24. Hi Chris,
    I see what you are trying to do. The problem is that there is no set format for undeliverable emails so extracting the email address so you can remove it from your contacts is not a simple task.
    What you can do is run the same steps as I describe here but also add the BODY to the extract (not just the Email). This will export all the email messages.
    you can then use Excel to open that file, go to the body column and there do a filter on the @ sign. Its not going to be pretty but it will work.
    Idealy you need to get someone to run a script that will search that Body column, find anything with the @ sign, then copy everything from the “space” before the @ sign till the next “space” (ie the email address) to another column.

  25. I tried to do this for all of my sent email in preparation for an eblast and it worked very well for items that are still in my sent folder which only went back a few weeks. Is there any way to retrieve email addresses from emails no longer currently in your sent box?
    Dani

  26. Thanks again. Great advice. I did exactly as you described and copied in the body part too. On that column once exported to Excel I added a module that did just what you said, found the @ then worked right and left to find the space. Works great. I had a few trailing and leading symbols to get rid of but did that in a further column using RIGHT and LEFT FIND functions. Thanks for the initial idea though – that was the hardest part. Have a great Xmas and all the best for 2012

  27. Nice tip, but two problems: You can only do one folder at a time and this is time consuming if you have dozens of folders as I do. Secondly, you have to then parse out all the multiple email addresses from emails where there ware more than one cc. Also very time consuming for multiple files. I finally decided to drop the 25 bucks for ACCM’s email extractor and it solved both these problems, but I have to say it was a little scary buying from a web site in China.

  28. Hi – yes there are lots of paid for apps that will automate this process. Some do it better then other, some have more/less features etc. The point I am making is that you dont need to spend money for something that is available for free – just very well hidden for some reason.

  29. Thank you very much – It is a very quick and hassle free method. LAthough for all mail folder, it needs to be repeated 🙁 – But thats a small price for the ease of ops.

    Now if you could tell me if theres is a magic to gathering all the email ids that seem to go in the memory and just appear when we start tying the id in the ‘to’ box.
    Thanks a lot in advance

  30. WOW. I actually spent a whole month trying to do this. And you simplified it into 5 steps. Thank you so much.

  31. HEy Techie Guy, Sounds like this has worked flawlessly for others and I tried it but it didnt work for me…could I be doing something wrong? I have one sub box that I want to extract from….I did everything you wrote and when it converted to csv, it only had the FromAddress in column A Could you give me some advise?

    Thanks,

    Tony

  32. Hi Techie,

    This worked great! Thanks for the help…I think I saw some other people post about this, but is there a way to dig into the sub folders as well with out manually going in and selecting each folder?

  33. I had given this project to our IT dept a week ago,we are a ft250 company so have quite a large resource. They were suggesting Macro’s and all other mainy technical answers but none were working. Out of frustration I googled it and this site popped up. After following your intructions I collected 600 plus emails in about 5 mins. I am now going to do the same with my colleagues
    Thank you very much

  34. not at the moment – this was a quick mock up example of why you dont need to pay big bux for features that Outlook should provide. If I get some time, I will expand this to sub folders too

  35. Hi – I like this very much, but when I try to select the folder to export from I can only see those in my Hotmail and Personal Folders sections, not in my separate business accounts. For some reason they do not appear in the list – any thoughts please?

  36. Just thought – is it because they’re IMAP accounts rather than the MAPI of Hotmail?

  37. This is a built in Outlook feature so not sure as cant replicate it. Try this tool: ttp://thetechieguy.com/2012/07/24/extracting-email-address-from-outlook-folder-subfolders/

  38. When I initially commented I clicked the “Notify me when new comments are added” checkbox and now each
    time a comment is added I get three e-mails with the same comment.
    Is there any way you can remove me from that service? Bless you!

  39. it’s very good from last three days , everyday 2 hours i was finding good software to extract Emails from Microsoft outlook 2010 email folder. but today morning i find it , it’s miracle , so simple. God knows all other software will work or not , but this build in export facility from outlook 2010 works very well. thanks your posting.

  40. THANK YOU THANK YOU. A BIG THANK YOU. THIS WAS SO SIMPLE AND SO EASY. AM SO GLAD I CAME ACROSS YOU PAGE.

  41. one more thing – the email ids are extracted, duplicates removed. now how does one remove multiple email ids in the same field – i.e. say in ‘TO’ : there are 4 email ids.
    is there a way to remove those

  42. IS there an easy way or sw available to
    batch delete email addresses when they are
    bouncebacks? I realize that there are
    many reasons for bouncebacks but
    I looked high and low for a sw or
    solution to easily getting rid of this problem?
    My wife is in charge of a prayer
    email chain and I just sent an email out
    and received back hundreds of
    undeliverable’s and wanted a simple
    solution to removing addresses from
    the emails themselves.

    Brent Carey
    [email protected]

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  44. Great, fantastic way to get email addresses out of Outlook – Well Done !

    Do you know of a way of extracting addresses from within an folder of emails in Outlook to export into Excel. We have over 1000 of these emails which are all emailed to us from the same third party with lead details in the body of the email we get. At present we cut and paste into Outlook contacts and our Newsletter software but an automated process would be fab. Any ideas ?

  45. Absolutely FANTASTIC!! Thank you so much. We were so worried we would have to buy software in order to import our database! What a legend!!!! Thank you so much!! Ark Animal Centre Puppy Shelter Team ♥

  46. Hey, there seems to be a character limit when exporting from Outlook to Excel. Has anyone found a way to fix this? I am exporting the body of the email into one of the columns, but the email address I need is at the the end of the paragraph, and it keeps getting cut off. Does anyone know of a work around?

  47. phenomenal I must say. often things are parked in front of your eyes and you really feel your stupid once you come to know them. I never thought I was bad with Google search, but my strive since last week made me believe so. I was about to buy outlook email address extractor bad heartedly but this link came in the last pages of the Google results. very very well done. you saved my life.

  48. Can you get the “reply-to” address? emails coming from a web site, like a subscriber list, will have the “from” address of the web master or whatever email address the owner wants there. I’m trying to extract the “reply to” address because that is where my web developer said the subscriber’s address would be. I don’t see it in the mapping options you’ve described.

  49. Thank you friend. it worked well! the guidelines are explained very well. Thanks again!

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