Extracting emails from files is probably something that most users will never even think of doing. It can however be interesting for some users who have them stored in a database with all kinds of information and want to extract all emails to mail every user in that database. It can be used for spamming users as well but I’m not advocating this falling victim to lots of spam emails each day.
The software Email Address Extract (via Ades Blog) works surprisingly well. All you need to do is point it at a folder on your hard drive and select the file type that should be crawled. Some preconfigured files types are htm, log and dat but it is possible to use wildcards or other file types as well. The option to process subfolders automatically could be worth checking as well.
The scan itself does not take longer than a few seconds normally. I did test it on one of my mailbox files in Thunderbird and it did extract more than 6000 emails from that which means it works practically with all files that contain text. Doubt it will be highly successful crawling binary files.
Emails that have been found can be exported into a text document for further processing. They can be sorted by username or mails server before doing so.
Tags: Email, extract emails, software, spam, Windows
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