Import Contacts into Outlook from an Email

This post is part of a project to move my old reference material to my blog. Before 2012, when I accessed the same pieces of code or general information multiple times, I would write a quick HTML page for my own reference and put it on a personal site. Later, I published these pages online. Some of the pages still get used and now I want to make them available on my blog.

This guide may be useful if you have an email that was sent to a group of people and you want to add all recipients to your contacts. This is most efficient for emails that were sent to a large group (like your entire company).

Open Outlook and locate an email that was sent out to the whole district
Right-click on the email in the list
Click Message Options…
In the Internet headers box, highlight everything in the To field and copy it to the clipboard
Open up a text editor such as Notepad
Paste the contents of the clipboard
Use your text editor’s find & replace feature to find " (that’s space quote) and replace it with “ (Nothing. Leave blank)
Use your text editor’s find & replace feature to find " < (That’s quote space less-than) and replace it with , (That’s comma space)
Use your text editor’s find & replace feature to find >, (That’s greater-than comma) and replace it with “ (Nothing. Leave blank.)
Save the file somewhere as contacts.csv
In Outlook, click File, Import and Export…
Select Import from another program or file and click Next
Select Comma Separated Values (Windows) and click Next
Click Browse and select the contacts.csv file
Under Options, select Replace duplicates with items imported (this will overwrite any old information and prevent duplicate entries) and click Next
Select Contacts and click Next
Click the box to the left of Import “contacts.csv” into folder: Contacts
Drag the first value to the Name field
Drag the second value to the Email field
Click OK
Click Finish

Cover photo by Mathyas Kurmann.