Email Extract from Documents icon

Email Extract
from Documents

Turn old file archives into an address book.

Point it at a folder — a backup drive, a network share, twenty years of client correspondence — and it reads every file inside it and every subfolder, collects the e-mail addresses it finds, and writes them to a single CSV with names. Sorted, deduplicated, ready to import.

Get it for €5

One-time purchase · instant download · no subscription, no account

Windows 10 / 11 One .exe, no install Works offline

The problem it solves

Contact data has a habit of ending up everywhere except the address book: in sent mail, in quotations, in price lists, in old letters. After fifteen or twenty years it is spread over tens of thousands of files on a backup drive, and nobody is going to open them one by one.

Worse, a good part of that archive is in formats today's software quietly refuses. A Word 97 document still opens in Word, but almost nothing else will read it — and that is exactly what sits in archives from the nineties and the two-thousands.

Formats it reads

E-mail
.eml
Documents
.pdf.docx.docm .doc.xlsx.xlsm .xls
Design files
.ai.eps.idml
Text
.txt.csv.html.htm

The two highlighted ones are the point. Word 97 (.doc) and Excel 97 (.xls) are the formats most current tools no longer open — and the ones old archives are full of.

What you get

One CSV file, written into the folder you scanned and named after it. Two columns, Name and E-mail Address, with a header row, so it imports straight into Outlook, Thunderbird or a CRM. UTF-8, so accented characters and umlauts show up correctly in Excel.

One folder of mixed old files in, one deduplicated CSV with names and addresses out.
One folder in, one list out — sorted, deduplicated, with names wherever the file provides one.

Automated senders are filtered out: noreply, bounce and newsletter addresses, message identifiers and tracking tokens. Real addresses such as webmaster@ or postmaster@ are kept.

Built to survive a full backup scan

Pause and resume

Stop the scan when it saturates your network. Continue later.

Crash-proof

Progress is journalled while it runs. After a crash or a restart it offers to continue where it stopped.

Live progress

Elapsed time, files processed and addresses found, while it works.

Nothing is skipped silently

Unreadable files and folders are logged, not treated as the end of the run.

The program after a completed scan, showing 16,491 files in 29 seconds and the time spent per file format.
After a completed run: 16,491 files in 29 seconds, with the time spent broken down per format.

It runs on your computer, and only there

A single .exe. No installation, no account, no cloud. The program makes no network connections at all — your archive and the addresses in it never leave your machine. Nothing is written except the CSV.

That is not a privacy promise you have to take on trust: unplug the network and it works exactly the same.

Before you run it

The first time you start it, Windows shows “Windows protected your PC”. Click More info, then Run anyway. This appears because the program is not signed with a commercial code-signing certificate — not because anything is wrong with the file.

You can verify the download yourself:

EmailExtract-1.2.4.zip
SHA-256: 80DF03048275AEF6E748179E2541BE0197251CCCD372467F2A9E2F559F591530

In PowerShell: Get-FileHash $HOME\Downloads\EmailExtract-1.2.4.zip

Requirements

Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit. Nothing else — the .NET runtime is included in the file.

In the download

EmailExtract.exe · documentation as PDF in English, German, French and Spanish · third-party licence notices.

€5

One-time purchase. Future versions included.

Get it for €5