Follow-up decays by the day
After a webinar, a conference, a launch: the people who emailed you about it are the warmest list you will have all quarter – and the value decays daily. The job is not "build a database". The job is "get every one of them into a sheet today, so follow-up goes out this week".
Step 1 – scope the event mail
Two operators do most of it:
subject:(webinar OR "product launch") after:2026/08/20
newer_than:14d "saw your talk"
Date-bound everything – after: with an explicit date, or newer_than:14d. An event list without a date bound quietly becomes an everything list. Search in Gmail first; when the result set looks like the event and nothing else, extract.
Step 2 – extract while it's warm
The four export routes are compared in our extraction guide; for a search-scoped, needed-today list the answer is script or add-on. Include more than From: someone forwarding your invite ("looping in my colleague – jane@…") put the most valuable address of the week into a message body, and a From-only export will never see it.
Step 3 – reconcile against registrations
If the event had a sign-up sheet, reconcile the two lists in Sheets:
=XLOOKUP(A2, Registrants!B:B, Registrants!B:B, "not registered")
Three segments fall out, each with its own follow-up: registered and emailed (hottest – reply personally), emailed but never registered (send the recording and the sign-up), registered but silent (the standard follow-up sequence).
Step 4 – the consent check, in one pass
Before anything goes out, apply Google's own sender guideline – "Don't send messages to people who didn't sign up to get messages from you" – to each row. People who emailed you about the event clear it comfortably. Addresses that only appeared in CC, or scraped-looking strangers, do not belong on the send.
Where Contact Extractor fits
Contact Extractor runs your event search – same syntax – and writes every address and name it finds into a deduplicated Google Sheet, reading all seven fields including bodies, where forwarded intros hide. Scope, extract, reconcile, send: an afternoon becomes twenty minutes, inside the window where following up still works.
→ Contact Extractor on the Google Workspace Marketplace
Sources
- Search operators you can use with Gmail – read 2026-08-20
- Email sender guidelines – Gmail Help – read 2026-08-20