Do you have a long list of contacts in your Google Mail (or Gmail) that you want to extract for any reasons at all? It can be quite a cumbersome exercise if you are to do that manually because you might have hundreds (and some cases, thousands) of email addresses in your account.
Who are in your contact list?
To know how to extract them, you must first understand how your contact information is managed by Gmail. There are in general a few types of email lists that exist in Gmail.
- My Contacts – That is the list of email addresses that you created manually. In most cases, you will key in these addresses mainly because they are those that you contact the most.
- Some email addresses are stored by Gmail as long as you have communicated with using your Gmail email address. In other words, as long as you have sent an email to this recipient (and not stored in your contact list), Gmail has a record of it.
- Based on the frequency of certain email addresses that you communicate with, Gmail has a list based on those that you are in contact with the most.
- Contact groups – This is something you can create to help you manage your email communications better.
Extracting your email addresses
Any of the emails in those explained above can be extracted via Gmail and you can do so by the steps below.
- Look for the drop-down menu on the left side of Gmail and choose ‘Contacts’. This will open up to a new window that displays all the email addresses.
- Choose ‘More’ on the drop-down menu and then find a function called ‘Export’.
- Then, select ‘The Group’ where you will then see more options. this would be groups that are categorized accordingly which are ‘My Contacts’, ‘Most Contacted’ or if the groups that you have created such as ‘Family’, ‘High School Friends’, etc. You could also choose ‘All Contacts’.
- You will then be able to choose between “Outlook CSV Format” or “vCard Format”. If you prefer to use the default, it will be in “Google CSV Format” which can be used if you are planning to export the contacts to another Gmail account.
- Now, you can click on ‘Export’ and you would then be asked on where you want to save the exported file to. Select the destination of your choice and the export process is completed.
