How to export email addresses from Apple Mail?

Solution 1:

In Mail, go to Window -> Previous Recipients. You can then add them to your Address Book. If you want to export the list to a file, you can do so in the Terminal by directly accessing the sqlite database with sqlite3. Excerpt from link (formatting mine):

This turns out to be more complicated than I had hoped, but it is possible.

The Apple mail program uses a database program available in Unix called “sqlite3.” The executable is in /usr/bin. For information about this program, type “man sqlite3” in a terminal window. Also, there is information on the web, at www.sqlite.org. A friend whose day job is in database administration helped me work this out.

First, go the proper directory in a terminal window:

cd ~/Library/Application Support/AddressBook

The file of interest is MailRecents-v4abcdmr.

Note that the file command describes this as:

$ file MailRecents-v4abcdmr
MailRecents-v4.abcdmr: SQLite database (Version 3)

$ sqlite3 MailRecents-v4.abcdmr
SQLite version 3.4.0
Enter ".help" for instructions
sqlite>

Let’s see the headers:

sqlite> .headers ON

Now, let’s get some information about what’s in this database file:

sqlite> select * from SQLITE_MASTER; /* don’t forget the semicolon */
/* lots of output */

The table ZABCDMAILRECENT is of interest to us. Note that the last 3 columns are called ZLASTNAME, ZFIRSTNAME, and ZEMAIL. We want these from the table, in columns, in filename.txt.

sqlite> .mode columns ZABCDMAILRECENT
sqlite> .width 15 15 36 /* make sure the columns are wide enough */
sqlite> .output filename.txt /* note: no ‘;’ */
sqlite:> select ZLASTNAME, ZFIRSTNAME, ZEMAIL from ZABCDMAILRECENT;
sqlite> .exit

Done. The email names and addresses are now in filename.txt, one per line.

Maybe, someday, someone at Apple will add this capability to mail.

Solution 2:

If using OS X 10.10 use the following code as the location of the previous recipients file changed. I did some digging and this worked for me (the following is all one line):

sqlite3 -csv ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.corerecents.recentsd/Data/Library/Recents/Recents 'select display_name, address from contacts where kind like "email";'>~/Desktop/recent.csv

This new 'Recents' file contains ALL recent contacts including, FaceTime and iMessage recipients so an additional filter was added to only export e-mail contacts.

Solution 3:

To export to a CSV file:

Run as one line:

sqlite3 -csv ~/Library/Application\ Support/AddressBook/MailRecents-v4.abcdmr 'select ZLASTNAME, ZFIRSTNAME, ZEMAIL from ZABCDMAILRECENT;'

To export to file "recent.csv":

sqlite3 -csv ~/Library/Application\ Support/AddressBook/MailRecents-v4.abcdmr 'select ZLASTNAME, ZFIRSTNAME, ZEMAIL from ZABCDMAILRECENT;'>recent.csv

Solution 4:

This is a stupid, but simple way to do it.

Mark all mails, choose print - but change to save to PDF, then export to Word, then export to TXT file format and start to filter the file with Text Wrangler.

Easy but stupid ;)