I have 20k odd emails in an inbox that I would LOVE to extract ONLY the email addresses

These are form submissions from last year, all people who have liked our company on Facebook. We NEED these emails and have been trying to sue a brutal x-coworker who refused to show us the true location of these emails. So I need to develop a script that can pull either the email field from the emails themselves, OR find a way to import outlook emails into contacts. If anyone could point me in the right direction of scripting or KNOWS OF ONE IN EXISTENCE, that will save me some time. My company barely wants to pay me to write a script, ONLY WILL because they really want these emails and have for a year now.

What kind of "inbox" are you talking about? Is this an Exchange mailbox? IMAP? POP3? Notes? Some webmailer? If you want help you need to give us something to work with.

We host our own emails on our webserver. The emails are stored there, and like I said above find a way to export the OUTLOOK emails into contacts of the "From" field. Whichever would be easiest to script either connecting to the webserver or outlook.

There are no "Outlook" e-mails. There are just e-mails. Let me rephrase my question: are the e-mails in question stored locally (e.g. in a PST file), or are they stored on the server? If they are stored on the server: what kind of mail server software are you using? Exchange? An IMAP server like Cyrus or Dovecot? Something entirely different?

It is an IMAP server with a cPanel back end entry. We are hosted through "Host Gator"

I understand there are no "outlook" emails. I was simply asking would it be easier to write a script that could work WITH outlook. OR would it be easier to write one for the SERVER where the emails are ORIGINALLY, but ALSO stored.

Since the mails are stored on an IMAP server, i'd say it's easier to get them from there, provided you have shell access to the server. cPanel seems to use Courier as its IMAP server component, which stores mails in Maildir format. Thus you can probably use a simple Perl script (or even grep/sed/awk) to extract the From: header from the e-mail files.

Yeah I'll take a look around at the scripts and hopefully get this done by tomorrow! Thanks for the help.

You're welcome. Feel free to ask if you need help with the Perl (or shell) script.

Or doing it in Powershell