Outlook Email Address Extractor

February 16, 2007 8:27 AM

I need to extract all the email addresses from my Outlook 2003 folders in order to send an email to a big bunch of people (trust me, I am not spamming). This program does exactly what I want, but it costs $29.95. This should be really straightforward, isn't there a free alternative?
posted by falameufilho to computers & internet (10 comments total)

If you have MSWord, you should be able to use the Mail Merge feature. (Tools|Letters and Mailings|Mail Merge)

One of the options in Merge is an email document...

I've used this for snailmail mass mailings and it works, with some cajoling. (Small tip: I recommend creating a new contacts folder with the list of your recipients. )

Just a guess, but if this is related to sending out a change of address to your contacts, I recommend Plaxo. It's free and automates some of the drudgery of maintaining a contact list.
posted by bodega at 8:50 AM on February 16, 2007

Nope, I don't think that's what I need - I need something that goes into my Outlook folders, scans each message for their sender address and puts it in a big list.
posted by falameufilho at 9:09 AM on February 16, 2007

(But I always wondering what Mail Merge did, so thanks for pointing that out!)
posted by falameufilho at 9:10 AM on February 16, 2007

I still think you can do it with MS Office. I think you can export those messages to a csv file or something, clean it up in Excel, then mail merge using Word and Excel.
posted by thilmony at 9:42 AM on February 16, 2007

First, sort by sender, so any duplicates will appear together. Then export to MS Excel. All the e-mail addresses will be in one column. Delete the duplicates (potentially tedious - got an intern?), then search-and-replace on the .com/.org/.net's to add commas or semicolons to the end of each address. Paste them into your BCC field and let rip.
posted by MaxVonCretin at 9:55 AM on February 16, 2007

No need for the intern - this will take care of the duplicates in excel
posted by clarkie666 at 9:59 AM on February 16, 2007

Ok, we are getting there! How can I export data from folders and subfolders, though? Outlook doesnt give me that option and I have a bunch of nested folders here...
posted by falameufilho at 10:23 AM on February 16, 2007

I wrote a quick .net app a few days ago that does exactly this. I'm using the Outlook 2007 interop libraries but it may work with 2003... ping me on aim (add a 2 to the end of my mf nickname)
posted by cmicali at 10:57 AM on February 16, 2007

The LinkedIn toolbar will do this. It will create a new contact list called "Found Contacts" or something like that, which you can then export/ mailmerge/ whatever.

on preview- cmicall has a pretty darn good answer, too.
posted by crazyray at 7:21 PM on February 16, 2007

ASAP Utilities will also get rid of duplicates in Excel.
posted by qvtqht at 9:54 PM on February 16, 2007