How to Aggregate Gmail Contacts

October 9, 2020 7:20 AM

I'd like to generate a list on Gmail of everyone I've ever sent an email to, or who's sent an email to me (for the purposes of generating various mailing lists). I've not been rigorous in adding contacts as they come in, so that list is incomplete. But it seems there must be a way, within Gmail or some external program, to do this?
posted by dearleader to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)

Google used to automatically add everyone to your contacts list; I'd start there. It doesn't look like you can directly export from there, but you might be able to sync it with something like Apple's Contacts app or something in Windows and export a list from there.
posted by neilbert at 8:05 AM on October 9, 2020

I haven't done exactly what you're talking about, but this should work:

Do a google takeout of your gmail in the JSON format.

Then run something like this on the takeout file and you should get all the email addresses.

You'll need to do some deduplicating of your list and possibly other cleanup remvoing quotes or commas etc.
posted by gregr at 8:28 AM on October 9, 2020 [1 favorite]