First off, I’ll get the link out of the way. If you go to http://vallery.net/gmail/ you can see this application in action. Now a little bit more about it.
I discovered that over the years I haven’t exactly been great about maintaining my addressbook. I’ve lost touch of many of acquaintances that I have had casual communication with. I realized that their email addresses where trapped in the deep bowels of my Gmail account, if only there was some way to extract them. I quickly realized that using the newly released IMAP protocol I could probe every message and then extract out the email addresses from it, and in some cases even additional data like the first and last name. I started playing around with the scripting a bit and came up with what I have now. This tool goes out to the Gmail IMAP server and downloads the message header from ever email that is stored in my Gmail account (except the SPAM folder). It pulls them into a master list, along with the first and last name if available. After all of the emails have been extracted it calculates some basic statistics including frequency of occurrence, which it users to sort them on. All of this information is then exported into CSV files that are compatible with many different applications.
While doing this I discovered an additional use for this data. On many of the social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn they will allow you to import a contact list file and find everyone that has registered for the service that you already know. This turned out to be a really killer app for this functionality. The only challenge was that they limit your ability to upload contacts to about 2,000 at one go. I added some additional functionality to my extract that “chunked” the file into several files, each with 2,000 email addresses in it. This allowed me to upload my newly discovered contacts a bit at a time, which worked very well.
If you would like to extract the email addresses from your Gmail or Google Apps for Domains account head over to http://vallery.net/gmail/ and give it a whirl!
This worked great. I’m donating now.
works great. just hope you don’t use/abuse the access you are given to do this! donating now- thank you!
Excellent tool, ur a genius! Will be donating. But u might want to instruct people where to receive their email results, cos for a moment I was stonned.. didn know what to do.
The addressed will be sent to your email account.
This thing IS NOT WORKING. The file you receive to your email is EMPTY !
But a great way to steal passwords from people who turst this kind of online SCAMS !!!
It works, it’s just not working at the moment. It’s not a scam or a way to steal your password you numbskull. Why would he care about your passwords.
Worked well. I had to clean up my CSV file a bit before LinkedIn would accept it. It could have been some of the strange characters in my address, but it stripped out all my addresses and it worked well. Kicked down $5 as it was great.
Hey it really works, one question tho, if I have an email inside my Gmail account, with message like
Hi Jules,
this is 3 email that you requested: email@email1.com, email2@mail2.com, email3@mail3.com, good luck
regards, Roger”
Will the application seach for the entire message body, or just TO/FROM and CC/BCC fields?
Its Amazing Dude….. Thanks a Ton …
It was scam or spam to steal your email password…
got a file with no records..It really seems to be a scam
iwant to extract info in the message body.. anything out there that will do that?
I used it once last year and it worked great. I wanted to use it again last week and donated to paypal but have yet to receive the file. Tried sending an email to Jason no luck. Whats up Jason…this is a great service but you seem to have gone AWOL…..
Hi folks who have commented on this thread — I’m doing some housekeeping and resurrecting my blog. I noticed these comments and thought I would follow-up.
The gmailextract.com tool is still available. It underwent a bit of a transformation a couple of months ago. I fixed a number of the reliability issues. As always, I do not retain personal information so you can feel safe in using it.
As a bit of a teaser I’ve also go a desktop version of the tool working which I hope to finish and start selling soon.