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Mining Contact Names and Email Addresses from Emails

One happy customer obtained 11,900 new contact records in just a few minutes this way!

If you're like most of us, you've received emails from time to time, that just beg for a way to parse out the contact names and email addresses from the cc: headers or the body of a forwarded email containing a long list of recipients who just happen to be either people you know, or perhaps people you would like to! e-Scribe makes it easy to parse out all these names and addresses and correctly populate your ACT! Database with them.

Simply place such emails into an Outlook inbox sub-folder that starts with the word "Mining" and scan it. Make sure that your e-Scribe import table has the following fields in it:

     Contact
     First Name
     Last Name
     Salutation
     Alternate Email Address

e-Scribe will search through every part of each email - the From Name and Address, cc: Header, body and attachments and will populate your import table with every one it finds. Those that don't have a name aliased over the email address will result in the email address being imported into the Contact column. Once the import is complete items that contain email addresses will be sorted to the top of the table. You can then use the search and replace function to perform surgery on these to arrive at the full contact names:

In the first set of search criteria select the Contact column and replace TEXT WITHIN CELLS: @* with nothing.

In the next set of search criteria select the Contact column and replace TEXT WITHIN CELLS: _
(an underline character) with a space.

In the next set of search criteria select the Contact column and replace TEXT WITHIN CELLS: .
(a period/dot) with a space.

In the next set of search criteria select the Contact column and replace TEXT WITHIN CELLS: -
(a hyphen) with a space.

Click the replace button and many names will be correctly converted from the email addresses - many will require manual editing, and some just won't be obtainable, but it's much better than trying to do it all one at a time.

One you have the list corrected export the file as a text file and then re-import it, to correctly transfer the contact names into the First Name, Last Name and Salutation fields, for those items that were parsed out of email addresses.