Most of the people you deal with are in your inbox, not in your contacts. Their name, job title, company and phone number are in the signature at the bottom of every email they've sent you. There are three ways to get them into a spreadsheet, and each gets you something different.
Outlook can export your saved contacts to a CSV file, which opens in Excel. It can't turn the people who have emailed you into a list in one go. Microsoft documents a CSV export for contacts only; email exports to an Outlook Data File (.pst), which is for backing up mail or moving it to another copy of Outlook, not for a spreadsheet. To get the details out of signatures, you either add senders one at a time or use a tool that reads the signatures for you.
| Outlook's export | By hand | Sigbot | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Who's in it | The contacts you've saved | Whoever you add | The people whose signatures are in your mailbox, or your team's mailboxes |
| What you get | Whatever was saved for each contact | What you copy from each signature | Name, job title, company, phone, email and address from each signature |
| Keeping it up to date | Export again | Edit each contact | Checks for new mail by itself: daily on paid plans, weekly on Free |
This gets you everyone in your Contacts folder, with the details that were saved for them. It misses anyone you haven't saved, and for most people that's nearly everyone who emails them.
Open the .csv file in Excel. If you'll import it somewhere again later, Microsoft suggests closing it without saving changes, so the file stays as Outlook wrote it.
What about the emails themselves? Microsoft documents a CSV export for contacts only. Email exports to an Outlook Data File (.pst): in classic Outlook through File > Open & Export > Import/Export > Export to a file > Outlook Data File (.pst), and in new Outlook through Settings > Files > Export. A .pst is a backup of your mailbox for Outlook to open, not a list of the people in it.
When there are only a few people to add, save them from their emails, then export them as above. Copy their job title, company and phone number across from the signature as you go.
That's fine for five people. For a few hundred it's a long job, and the list starts going out of date the day someone changes jobs.
Sigbot reads the email signatures in Outlook and turns each one into a contact: name, job title, company, phone, email and address. Then you export the list to Excel or CSV. It works with Outlook and Microsoft 365.
The first scan reads the mail already in your mailbox. Newsletters and no-reply mail wait in a review queue instead of going straight into your list, and merges can be undone.
Download the whole list as an Excel or CSV file whenever you need it.
It keeps up by itself. After the first scan, Sigbot checks your mailbox for new mail by itself: every day on paid plans, every week on Free. New people are added as they email you, so next month's export has them too. Addresses that bounce are flagged and left out of exports; nothing is deleted automatically.
For a team: everyone connects their own Outlook, and on team plans you share folders, so the whole team works from one shared contact list built from everyone's Outlook.
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). Send your IT team our one-page brief for IT admins: it has the approval link and what Sigbot reads and keeps.
Prefer a spreadsheet to start from? Our free subcontractor and supplier list template (Excel and CSV) starts with the same columns as Sigbot's export.
Every Outlook step above was checked against Microsoft's support pages on 20 October 2026. Microsoft changes its menus from time to time; if yours look different, these pages have the latest steps.
Outlook and Microsoft 365 are trademarks of the Microsoft group of companies.