"Export the senders" misses most of the addresses
Ask anyone where email addresses live in a mailbox and they will say the From line. It is one of seven places – and depending on the job, it is not even the most useful one.
The seven fields, and when each one matters
1. From. The obvious one: who wrote to you. For a list of people who initiated contact, From is the field. Its trap is machine senders – no-reply@, billing@ – which belong in no outreach list.
2. To. Your outbound network: everyone you wrote to. A From-only export describes who approaches you; adding To describes who you approach. For a "people I actually work with" list, To usually matters more than From.
3. CC. The people kept in the loop – often the colleagues, assistants and stakeholders around your main contact. Valuable for account mapping; risky for outreach, because a CC bystander never chose to correspond with you.
4. BCC. Only visible on mail you sent – recipients never see each other's BCC, but your own sent messages keep yours. If you have been BCC-ing your own record-keeping address or quietly including a colleague, this is where those trails live.
5. Reply-To. The quiet one. Newsletters and systems commonly send from an unmonitored address and put the monitored one in Reply-To – so the human contact for that sender is not in From at all. A From-only export files these people under no-reply@.
6. Subject line. Rarer, but real: forwarded requests and quick intros – "can you loop in jane@…" – put addresses straight into subjects.
7. Message body. The biggest and messiest source. Signatures, "meet Jane, cc'd, or reach her at jane@…" intros, contact details pasted into a thread. The addresses you were given – as opposed to corresponded with – live almost entirely in bodies. The trade-off is noise: bodies also hold every address ever quoted in a reply chain, so deduplication and a human review pass matter most here.
Choosing fields by job
| Job | Fields to include |
|---|---|
| Who approaches me | From |
| Who I work with | From + To + CC |
| Full relationship map | All seven |
| Humans behind newsletters | Reply-To |
| People I was introduced to | Body (+ review pass) |
Where Contact Extractor fits
Contact Extractor reads all seven fields – From, To, CC, BCC, Reply-To, subject and body – scoped by any Gmail search or label, and writes the addresses and the names attached to them into a deduplicated Google Sheet. You choose which fields feed the extraction, which is exactly the choice the table above is about.
→ Contact Extractor on the Google Workspace Marketplace
Sources
- Search operators you can use with Gmail – read 2026-08-20
- Seven-field capability: PRODUCT.md capability boundary + live FAQ #6, confirmed 2026-09-01