A disclaimer, you shouldn’t just add people to a newsletter list indiscriminately. You should endeavor to get them to opt-in in every way possible. Another other option sucks. While what I describe is a bit of a special case, all the addresses that I extracted were used to solicit opt-ins.

Right, so my problem here was that a client asked needed to extract data from a few disparate sources and build a clean, usable list of email addresses. Certainly no small feat since some of this was going to have to come out of an email account itself. I wasn’t even going to benefit from working from contacts either – addresses had to come from the messages themselves. I’m going to describe what I did to get there.

Also, this only relates to work with data locally. This does not describe scraping email addresses off web sites, etc. That may be another challenge for another day.