Create contact list by extracting recipients from e-mails

Question

In 2012, on Thunderbird, I used an add-on to create an address list by extracting all recipients found in emails folders. But, I have reinstalled everything, and I do not remember how I did it...

Similar questions have no satisfactory answer:

• How to copy all email addresses from an email in Thunderbird
• How can I copy 40 BCC addresses to an address book?

And nothing found on Zindus and Google Contacts...

How can I create an address list (mailing) from email recipients?

• The solution should be GMail compliant.
• The solution may be based on Thunderbird.

Solution 1

I was successful with simple copy and paste:

• Opened source of mail which I wanted to us as mailing list template
• Copied To: and CC: headers from source (Ctrl+U)
• Created new mailing list in the address book, pasting all addresses comma-separated in the first line of the members list.

I had to clean out double entries in one case. But that's in any case better than dragging together the list one by one.

(below added by benjaoming)

To clean up UTF-8 headers in the TO and CC fields, do the following:

1. Open a command line

2. Type pythonEnter.  Then do the following commands:

   from email.header import decode_header
   print u" ".join(x[0].decode("utf-8") for x in decode_header(u"""PASTE YOUR HEADER CONTENTS HERE"""))

This will output text that's copy-paste friendly for Thunderbird's list editor

Solution 2

After some research I found back how I did last year: I used EMail Address Crawler (a very old Thunderbird add-on).

• open the context menu on an folder (of emails)
• select Crawl folder for email addresses
• choose the destination mailing list (or create new one)
• choose some options, click OK
• then the add-on extracts email addresses from the folder emails content

But, EMail Address Crawler v3 is not compatible with recent Thunderbird. Therefore, in order to force install, disable extensions.checkCompatibility in the about:config or simply use Disable Add-on Compatibility Checks.

However, my Thunderbird 17.0.5 is too recent and even disabling compatibility check, I cannot use EMail Address Crawler, the folder context menu just open the contact addresses dialogue box, no more!

Otherwise, there is another alternative: CrowdMailer, a basic (and old) Thunderbird add-on. Copy-paste the email source code into the CrowdMailer dialogue box. Then CrowdMailer extracts the email addresses and proposes to create a new email filled with these extracted addresses. But I did not found a way to save these addresses within a mailing list...

Comments

[gozzilli]

Excellent, I didn't think of this. This should be the accepted answer.

[benjaoming]

I encounter problems with UTF-8 formatted TO: headers... editing this answer to show the steps...

[oHo]

Why do you need to convert text to ANSI?