How to extract email addresses from my Yahoo inbox?

March 8, 2022 9:58 AM

I've lost my Yahoo contacts (doesn't matter how) but I have my Yahoo inbox. I want to get the email addresses from everyone who has sent an email to my yahoo address. There are various 3rd-party programs out there that claim to be able to do it. Sobolsoft, bitrecover, KMTTech, MacUncle, and Mailsware are some of them. Anyone have experience with any of these? Prices range from $30-$99. Any non-obvious cautions?

The email inbox is actually branded Rogers (Canadian internet provider), my address is in the form [e-mail] not [e-mail]. It's actually Yahoo mail, but I don't think I can just go into Yahoo (or Rogers) mail directly. Or can I? Maybe the contacts are there in the web app?
I don't want to export my contact list; it doesn't exist. Also don't want to export whole messages unless I absolutely have to. Programs mentioned above claim to be able to just scrape the addresses, which I think must be theoretically possible. I'm not afraid of outright scams (think I can spot them), but from buying a program that's clunky or will involve a lot of extra editing of output on my part.

posted by feelinggood to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

How I'd do this:

1. Install Thunderbird and hook it up to my Yahoo account via IMAP. This should make it download just the headers of every mail in every folder in the account; with an IMAP connection you have to tweak some Thunderbird settings to make it download whole messages for offline use, but don't bother doing that because the headers are where the email addresses live and downloading only the headers is way faster.

2. Choose Add-Ons from Thunderbird's Tools menu, put "Copy Address" in the "Find more extensions" box at the top of the Add-Ons page and hit Enter, then add the Copy Address by ctrlxc extension which should be the first one on the search results page.

3. Click on any email in your inbox (or any other folder), then press Ctrl-A to select all the mails in that same box, then click the Copy Address button that the extension adds to the right hand side of the toolbar.

4. Paste the resulting clipboard contents into any text editor, then replace every comma with a newline.
posted by flabdablet at 11:57 AM on March 8, 2022 [6 favorites]

Was coming here to give Flabdablet's answer.
posted by goingonit at 3:57 PM on March 8, 2022

What I'd do is in the inbox search bar do a search for recognized email extensions like this:
"Inbox *@yahoo.com" and all other such extensions.
posted by The_imp_inimpossible at 8:27 AM on March 9, 2022