How to get a list of every email address you've emailed in Outlook

For the people you've saved, export your contacts: every version of Outlook can. For the people you've sent mail to, the nearest thing is the suggestions list, which only work or school accounts can download. Your Sent Items hold every address, but Microsoft documents no spreadsheet export for email, only a backup file for Outlook. Every route gives you addresses, not job titles, companies or phone numbers. Those are in people's email signatures, which is what Sigbot reads.

The file opens in Excel. On a Mac, Microsoft documents only an archive file from legacy Outlook for Mac (see Sent Items), so with a Microsoft 365 or Outlook.com account, export from Outlook on the web instead. More detail, and how to add a sender as a contact: how to extract contacts from Outlook emails into Excel.

Check what you download. Microsoft doesn't say what the file contains or what format it's in, so open it before you rely on it. Leave the other two controls alone unless you mean to use them: the Discovered contacts toggle stops Microsoft 365 capturing contacts, and Clear data removes what it has gathered.

New Outlook, Outlook on the web and Mac. Suggestions come from your saved contacts, your organisation's address book and the addresses you've sent mail to before. Microsoft documents no way to view or export them inside Outlook. With a personal Microsoft account (Outlook.com or Hotmail), Microsoft's page covers only turning People suggestions off, not downloading them.

What people try instead. One question on Microsoft's own Q&A forum, from someone on new Outlook with nobody saved as a contact (asked in July 2023), has 18 answers and none accepted. Some of them export a mail folder to a CSV file through classic Outlook's Import/Export wizard, then cut it down in Excel: one person's 106,000 rows came down to about 1,300 addresses. Microsoft doesn't document exporting email to CSV, so we haven't given steps for it, and we don't suggest macros or scripts you'd have to trust blindly.

Tidying a list in Excel. Whatever list you end up with, select the column, then Data > Remove Duplicates. Microsoft says the duplicates are deleted for good, so copy the original to another sheet first.

• No job titles, companies or phone numbers. Suggestions and lists built from mail hold a name and an address at most, and a contacts export has only what someone typed in.
• Duplicates. A list built from mail has a row for each message, not each person, which is how 106,000 rows can shrink to 1,300.
• Junk mixed in. Lists built from your mail mix no-reply senders, newsletters, shared inboxes like info@ and your own colleagues in with the people you actually deal with.
• Out of date the day you make it. When someone changes job or number, the file doesn't change with them.

The details that are missing are usually in the signature at the bottom of every email those people send you.

Signatures, not just addresses. Each contact comes from the person's own signature, so the export has the job title, company and phone number that Outlook's lists leave out. Sigbot finds the people whose signatures are in your mailbox. Someone you emailed once who never wrote back hasn't sent you a signature, so for them the address-only routes above are still the way.

A cleaner export. Newsletters and no-reply mail wait in the review queue for you to approve or reject. Duplicates can be merged, and merges can be undone. Addresses that bounce are flagged and left out of exports; nothing is deleted automatically.

It keeps up by itself. After the first scan, Sigbot checks your mailbox for new mail: every day on paid plans, every week on Free. When a newer email's signature shows a different job title or phone number, it updates the contact and keeps their previous job titles and companies.

It only reads. Sigbot only reads mail, and it never writes to your Outlook contacts. At work, most companies have IT approve it once, for everyone, because Microsoft's default setting stops people giving any outside app access to their mail. Sigbot's Outlook app is publisher-verified by Microsoft (SIGBOT LTD), and our one-page brief for IT admins has the approval link.

More from the same list. On team plans you share folders, so the whole team works from one list built from everyone's Outlook: sharing Outlook contacts with your team. The iPhone and Android apps can add the list to your phone's address book, so calls show a name and company. Building a lasting list: a contact database from email signatures. Outlook add-ins and other tools: the ways to turn signatures into contacts.