Everyone who emails you puts their details at the bottom of every message: name, job title, company, phone number. Put together, those signatures are the most up-to-date contact list you have. Here's how to collect them into one, by hand or automatically, and what makes the list worth keeping.
Outlook keeps the contacts you save, but it doesn't read the signatures in your mail and fill them in for you. So there are two ways to get from signatures to a contact list. You can copy each person across by hand, which is fine for a few people. Or you can use a tool that reads the signatures and files each person as a contact. Sigbot does that for Outlook and Microsoft 365: it reads a whole mailbox, or a whole team's, checks for new mail after that, and puts the list on your phone too.
| By hand | Sigbot | |
|---|---|---|
| Who's in it | Whoever you copy across | Everyone whose signature is in your mailbox, or your team's mailboxes |
| What you get | What you copy from each signature | Name, job title, company, phone, email and address from each signature |
| Keeping it up to date | Edit each contact when you notice a change | Checks for new mail by itself: daily on paid plans, weekly on Free |
| Sharing it | Send the spreadsheet round | Share a folder, so the whole team works from the same list (team plans) |
| On your phone | Type them in again | Caller ID sync adds them to your phone's address book |
For a handful of people, do it yourself. Pick one place for the list and use the same columns every time, so it stays sortable.
That's fine for five people. For a few hundred it takes days, and the list starts going out of date the day someone changes their number or their job. Work in construction? Our free subcontractor and supplier list template (Excel and CSV) starts with the same columns as Sigbot's export.
Sigbot reads the email signatures in Outlook and turns each one into a contact. It works with Outlook and Microsoft 365, and it only reads mail: it can't send, move or delete anything.
Start free and connect your Outlook with your Microsoft account. No card needed.
Sigbot reads the signatures in the mail already in your mailbox and files each person as a contact. Newsletters and no-reply mail wait in a review queue instead.
Search by name or company, share folders with your team, export to Excel or CSV, and add the list to your phone's address book.
At work, IT approves it once. Microsoft's default setting stops people giving any outside app access to their mail, so most companies have an admin approve Sigbot once, for everyone. Sigbot's Outlook app is publisher-verified by Microsoft (SIGBOT LTD). Our one-page brief for IT admins has the approval link and says what Sigbot reads and keeps.
Collecting signatures is the easy part. These are what make the list one people trust, whichever way you build it.
People write from more than one address, and sign off differently on their phone. Keep one contact per person and merge the rest into it. In Sigbot, merges can be undone if two people get joined by mistake.
Mailing lists and automated mail have signatures too. Keep them out. Sigbot holds them in a review queue for you to approve or reject.
A signature list is only as good as its latest email. Sigbot checks each mailbox for new mail by itself after the first scan: daily on paid plans, weekly on Free. Addresses that bounce are flagged and left out of exports, and nothing is deleted automatically.
A list on one laptop helps one person. On team plans, everyone connects their own Outlook and you share folders. The iPhone and Android apps can add the list to your phone's address book, so calls show a name and company.
Outlook and Microsoft 365 are trademarks of the Microsoft group of companies.