What is this?

Have you ever needed to extract the emails of all the people you've discussed certain topics with?

Maybe to bootstrap a mailing list, a newsletter, or to send them an update?

gmailcrawl is a command line tool, written in go, to extract all email addresses involved in threads you select.

It only works with GMAIL accounts, since it uses GMAIL APIs.

Unlike many online services that allow you to scan your emails and extract addresses, it does not require you to authorize third parties to access your mailbox.

Your security token is stored on your machine, and only shared with the very simple gmailcrawl code you run yourself.

Once you install it, you can, for example, run:

./gmailcrawl --query="robots championship" --limit=1000

to get gmailcrawl to scan all of your emails that talk about "robots championship", and print to standard output a list of unique email addresses.

You can also use the --whitelist or --blacklist flag to discard some addresses based on regular expressions.

The default --blacklist automatically excludes some known email addresses you probably don't care about (for example, twitter notifications or updates to your google docs).

Installation

1. Install the go build and runtime environment. On a Debian GNU/Linux system, run:

   apt-get install golang
   

2. Compile and install gmailcrawl:

   go get github.com/ccontavalli/gmailcrawl
   

3. Profit:

   $GOPATH/bin/gmailcrawl --query="robots championship" --limit=1000
   

The first time you run the tool, it will ask you to visit a google web site, authorize it, and return a token to cut and paste. Just follow the instructions.

This is necessary to authorize the tool to access your mailbox, and give it a token to be passed to the gmail APIs.