This site will have limited functionality while we undergo maintenance to improve your experience. If an article doesn't solve your issue and you want to ask a question, we have our support community waiting to help you at @FirefoxSupport on Twitter and/r/firefox on Reddit.

Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

Can I create a list of "correspondent" mail IDs from a specific folder of emails?

  • 3 replies
  • 0 have this problem
  • 1 view
  • Last reply by Matt

more options

My email ID is with my ISP (Internet Service Provider). This email ID was created 20 years or so ago, when I didn't know better re having my email ID tied to an ISP. They have decided to be exceedingly unreasonable in rates and I have switched ISPs. But now I need to set up a new e-mail ID; one not associated with an ISP.

I did a search of my Thunderbird email to find all email from the last 25 months (past 2 years plus a one month buffer) and created a Thunderbird folder from that search. I want to extract the email IDs for all "correspondents" from this folder, put it into Excel and filter to remove duplicate correspondents. Then I will cleanse the list of all "correspondents" I do not wish to share my new email ID with and send e-mails to the rest advising those recipients to start using my new email ID.

I have been unsuccessful in several attempts to extract a list. I have the Thunderbird folder created from the search. I can "Select All", but this gets me the contents of all emails rather than the displayed metadata (subject, correspondents, date, location). Note that this folder contains over 5600 entries so I wish to avoid a manual process if at all possible.

Is there a way I can accomplish want I want? Any technique can, but doesn't have to, use the folder of emails created from the search.

Thanks

My email ID is with my ISP (Internet Service Provider). This email ID was created 20 years or so ago, when I didn't know better re having my email ID tied to an ISP. They have decided to be exceedingly unreasonable in rates and I have switched ISPs. But now I need to set up a new e-mail ID; one not associated with an ISP. I did a search of my Thunderbird email to find all email from the last 25 months (past 2 years plus a one month buffer) and created a Thunderbird folder from that search. I want to extract the email IDs for all "correspondents" from this folder, put it into Excel and filter to remove duplicate correspondents. Then I will cleanse the list of all "correspondents" I do not wish to share my new email ID with and send e-mails to the rest advising those recipients to start using my new email ID. I have been unsuccessful in several attempts to extract a list. I have the Thunderbird folder created from the search. I can "Select All", but this gets me the contents of all emails rather than the displayed metadata (subject, correspondents, date, location). Note that this folder contains over 5600 entries so I wish to avoid a manual process if at all possible. Is there a way I can accomplish want I want? Any technique can, but doesn't have to, use the folder of emails created from the search. Thanks

All Replies (3)

more options

If you do a web search for "extract email id from eml" you will be presented with a number of urls that have instructions on how to do that.

more options

Thanks for the reply David. I looked through quite a list and everything seems to require buying somebody's "the greatest ever program" to do this one time thing. I decided to just export my "Collected Addresses", put in Excel, remove those I don't wish to notify of the change in address and go from there.

I have to admit I was surprised that there doesn't seem to be a way to pull this info from the folder email listing itself (basically, a screen scrape).

more options

dgillesp said

I have to admit I was surprised that there doesn't seem to be a way to pull this info from the folder email listing itself (basically, a screen scrape).

There used to be an addon, but it went out of support a few years ago.

A rather "backward" way to do what you want is use the import export tools addon. https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/importexporttools-ng/?src=ss

This allows the export of "all messages" in a folder > just index (CSV). This generates a CSV file with essentially the from and to addresses and subjects of all the email. It might suit your needs, it might not.