How can I export only email addresses from my address book?

Well, one thing you could do is this, though it still takes some work:

1) In Mail create a new message.

2) add the group to the To: field (if you have it as a "true" group set up in your Address Book, you can just drag the whole Group there.)

3. Save the email as a Draft.

4. From Mail, drag the message to your desktop which will give you a .eml file.

5. Open the .eml with TextEdit (or any word processing app). You'll get a bunch of other text and gobbledegook, but you will find the list of email addresses somewhere near the beginning of the file and just copy and paste them out of there.

From the App Store download Address Book Extractor and use it to export to a .csv file, import the .csv into Excel/Numbers/Open Office etc, delete all columns except for names and email addresses, voila, an email address list.

Address Book extractor is $1.99

ItchNscratch wrote:

I think I got it - but it is not very elegant.

First, I save the group as a vcard to my desktop.

Then I use this converter to save it as a cvs file.

Now I open the cvs file in Excel.

When I open it up it gives me options on how to treat the data. Since I see that the info in the cvs file is separated by colons, i do not select any of the presets, but instead use "other" and type in a colon (:).

When the excel file opens, all of the e-mail addresses are in the same column, so I just copied and

pasted that column to a new page, sorted the column in ascending

alphabetic order (this moves all of the blank rows to the bottom),

scanned through the list and deleted the few names that preceded the

e-mail addresses (e.g. First Last <FirstLast@email.com>), then removed

duplicates.

I can now save this excel file back as a .cvs file or text or whatever I need.

Thanks to Tony Lindsay for helping me on this - and my wife for suggesting the Excel angle.

This method also works, I hadn't come across this converter before but it seems good, $1.99 is cheap and the extractor may be easier to use, but it's a close thing...Thanks

You dont need any additional software!

- mark all contacts in your address book

- export to a vCard

- open a terminal window

- go to folder with vCard (for example cd Desktop)

- make sure, file is visible

ls vCards.cvf

- the type the following command:

grep EMAIL vCards.vcf | sed s/EMAIL.*://g | sort -u > a.txt

- now you have a new file a.txt with all emails and nothing else

Clever!

I came across an easier solution: Paste one line into Terminal:

defaults write com.apple.mail AddressesIncludeNameOnPasteboard -bool false

After you do this, re-launch Apple mail. Then copy e-mail addresses from the To/BCC fields. When you paste you'll get the just e-mail addresses without the full names (which is perfect for pasting into other websites and applications).

Via OSXDaily: Stop Pasting Full Names When Copying an Email Address in Mac OS X Mail

Thanks!

(for the Terminal thing)

grep EMAIL vCards.vcf | sed s/EMAIL.*://g | sort -u > a.txt

🙂