Extract emails from gmail

Question

I have a website with a contact form.

Once the user fills in the form, an email is being sent to my gmail in the following syntax:

From: Contact us form <contact-us-form@example.com>

To: example@gmail.com

Message body:

• Name: username filled in form
• Email: emailaddress@hotmail.com
• Message: Hi, how are you?

---

I'm looking for a way to extract all the Emails that were filled in the form.. since the email from address is my own one and not the form filler one, I can't see their email address in my contacts tab.

Anyone has any idea how to do this?

Answer 1

Gmail provides IMAP access to their accounts.

This means, you could relatively easily have someone write a small script or application that connects to the IMAP server and downloads the contents of the mails in question. There are plenty of modules available for accessing IMAP in different programming languages, for instance:

• For Perl, there's Net::IMAP::Simple.
• For Python, there's imaplib.
• For C#, there's a few alternatives in this StackOverflow question.
• etc...

If you wish to do it manually, you could use most standard mail clients, and add the IMAP server to it. Then you could do a search for the subject line, and export those emails in an appropriate format.

An example of such a client is Thunderbird, where you could use SmartSave to export the emails, for instance.

Answer 2

In this article there is a discussion about using a + sign in your gmail address to help prefilter mail. So if you have the ability, you can change your contact for email address to something along the lines of your.email+contactform@gmail.com. The mail will still be delivered to your.email@gmail.com but you can filter on messages sent to your.email+contactform@gmail.com. So you can forward them off, or label them a certain way, or whatever else you might need.