When you get serious about Internet and permission based email marketing you will run into many situations where you will want to create a nice, clean list of email addresses that are scattered about in a file and lumped in with lots of other text. You would want this list of email addresses so you can easily use them in one of your bulk mail software programs or to upload to your list management company.

For instance, you might have a bunch of email addresses that you exported from a database program that looks like this:

"[name]","[email]"
"Gary","tummytuck@xyz.com"
"David","facelift@abc.com"
"Wendell","boobjob@hottermail.com"
"Marlyn","hairtransplant@yahole.com"
"Maxine","lipo@artificiallyskinny.com"
"Carolyn","rhinoplasty@hair.net"

After using an email extractor program you would end up with a list like this:

tummytuck@xyz.com
facelift@abc.com
boobjob@hottermail.com
hairtransplant@yahole.com
lipo@artificiallyskinny.com
rhinoplasty@hair.net

Can you imagine how long it would take you to clean this list up by hand? What if you had a hundred or a thousand or ten thousand addresses?

Email extractors do this within seconds or maybe as much a couple minutes or so for a long list.

I got the one I use from http://go.to/eextractor It cost $24.99. If you have a smart kid working in your office you can probably find one for free that will probably work just fine.

I have lots of lists and sublists and legitimate sources for email addresses and this tool saves me hours and hours of work to use those addresses.

Warning: Some of these tools are designed to be used by spammers to grab email addresses off of websites, newsgroups, etc. I do not condone the use of these tools for that purpose.

More automation techniques:

This section will be an ongoing effort to keep you from grabbing your mouse which slows you down, and is bad for your wrist.

• In Internet explore simply type "my documents" or "my computer" in the address line and hit enter and you will be taken directly to the respective area of your computer.

• Also in Internet explorer simply type "go" or "find" and then a search term and you will be taken to a set of search engine results based on your search terms.

Upcoming topics for this section

• Organize your email

• Reduce the impact of SPAM email

• The greatest keyboard shortcuts

• Respond to emails while you sleep with autoresponders

• Using templates so you never have to reinvent the wheel

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