How to Build a Sales Contact List from Email Conversations

If you’ve worked in sales, marketing, partnerships, or run your own agency or startup – chances are, your most valuable contacts are already sitting in your inbox.

Old pitches. Warm leads that are ghosted. Follow-up threads that went cold. Intros from three jobs ago. All of it’s there – buried in your email conversations.

And yet, when the time comes to build a lead list or re-engage your network… Most of us start from scratch. Or worse, we try to remember names manually.

It doesn’t need to be that way.

Let’s be honest – the default way most of us “build” our contact lists looks like this:

• Scroll through Gmail
• Open old threads
• Copy email addresses one by one
• Paste into Sheets or a CRM
• Hope we didn’t miss anyone important

It’s tedious. It’s slow. And more often than not, we give up halfway through.

There are Chrome extensions that claim to help, but they often raise red flags:
❌ They ask for broad permissions
❌ They send data to third-party servers
❌ They break with Google’s UI updates

And if you care about data privacy – especially for leads, clients, and personal networks – that’s a risk you shouldn’t take.

This is why we built Contact Extractor – a tiny tool that lives inside your Google Workspace and does one job:

Pull out names, emails, and phone numbers from any email conversation or document – instantly.

It’s built for people like us:
Sales folks juggling a million follow-ups
Founders trying to rebuild their “black book”
Teams that don’t want to lose leads to inbox clutter

No logins. No external dashboards. No AI scraping your data.

It runs inside Google Sheets to define rules and workflows, and then it scans your Gmail inbox – and it’s verified by Google.

🛠 Try it here:
→ Contact Extractor on 8apps Website
→ Contact Extractor by 8apps on Google Workspace Marketplace

Or browse through the FAQs for Contact Extractor

Let’s be honest – the default way most of us “build” our contact lists looks like this:

• Scroll through Gmail
• Open old threads
• Copy email addresses one by one
• Paste into Sheets or a CRM
• Hope we didn’t miss anyone important

It’s tedious. It’s slow. And more often than not, we give up halfway through.

There are Chrome extensions that claim to help, but they often raise red flags:
❌ They ask for broad permissions
❌ They send data to third-party servers
❌ They break with Google’s UI updates

And if you care about data privacy – especially for leads, clients, and personal networks – that’s a risk you shouldn’t take.

Let’s be honest – the default way most of us “build” our contact lists looks like this:

• Scroll through Gmail
• Open old threads
• Copy email addresses one by one
• Paste into Sheets or a CRM
• Hope we didn’t miss anyone important

It’s tedious. It’s slow. And more often than not, we give up halfway through.

There are Chrome extensions that claim to help, but they often raise red flags:
❌ They ask for broad permissions
❌ They send data to third-party servers
❌ They break with Google’s UI updates

And if you care about data privacy – especially for leads, clients, and personal networks – that’s a risk you shouldn’t take.

Let’s be honest – the default way most of us “build” our contact lists looks like this:

• Scroll through Gmail
• Open old threads
• Copy email addresses one by one
• Paste into Sheets or a CRM
• Hope we didn’t miss anyone important

It’s tedious. It’s slow. And more often than not, we give up halfway through.

There are Chrome extensions that claim to help, but they often raise red flags:
❌ They ask for broad permissions
❌ They send data to third-party servers
❌ They break with Google’s UI updates

And if you care about data privacy – especially for leads, clients, and personal networks – that’s a risk you shouldn’t take.