Did someone send you a bulk email and foolishly leave all the recipients exposed? Do you want to grab those recipients and use for your own great purposes? Good news, it’s not so hard to do!
Here’s what you’ll need:
- A text editor (gedit on ubuntu)
- Spreadsheet software (Libre Office is the one I’ll use here since it’s both free and awesome)
1. Copy and paste the emails into a text editor
Grab the group of email addresses starting from right after the ‘to: ‘ but don’t actually include the ‘to:’. Copy this into your clipgboard.
2. Paste this to a fresh text editor window
3. Clean up the Paste
Make sure there is a trailing semi-colon after the last entry and no other gobbly gook before or after, other than just the names of the recipients and the actual email addresses. So like this stuff:
John Doe johndoe@johndoe.com; Jane Doe janedoe@janedoe.com;
4. Save file as a .csv file
Click ‘save as’ and give the file a handy name and make sure it has a trailing .csv as the file type
5. Go and open the file.
In my case it opens the file with LibreOffice – this is good. In your case…how could I know your case?
6. Select ‘semi-colon’ as the separation type
When Libre Office opens the file, uncheck comma, etc, and just leave the semi-colon because that’s what you’ve got.
7. Reformat the Orientation (optional)
After importing thus far, Libre Office seems to make the orientation horizontal putting one email address in each column and all the entries into a row spanning many horizontal columns which I didn’t like. I want to convert this to a vertical orientation with the entries spanning downwards across many rows.
Yippee yay. Someone alrady figured this out here
But in short, just do this:
- copy all your horizontal entries
- copy them to clipboard (control c)
- control + shift + V into the cell you want
- Paste (which does the ‘paste special’ command)
- Delete the original row you just copied from
Voila. Clean vertical list of harvested emails!
Hope that helps.
My Comments
My only improvement would be to add a script that pulls the name out and adds to the column on the right. I know thunderbird can do this when you right click and either ‘copy email address’ or ‘copy name and email address’. So it’s definitely possible to do this. In fact, how cool would that be if Thunderbird could just do all this in an add-on … hmm. Too bad I can’t program…
