How to Import a List of Emails into Your Gmail Contacts

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Import a List of Emails into Your Gmail Contacts

Let's say you have a list of email addresses and you want to import them into your Google contacts. There's nothing fancy about the list...no home addresses or phone numbers, it's just a list of email address. This kind of mailing list can be imported into Google as contacts without any special software or tools. This article will show you the steps to format, save, and then import that list right into Gmail.

Difficulty: Moderate

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

A list of emails
Notepad or TextEdit

Step 1

Take your email address and paste them into notepad (on a PC) or Textedit (on a mac). This tutorial assumes each email address is separated by a "carriage return" - that is, each address is on a new line as pictured here. If there is something else separating the email addresses, go to the additional tips at the bottom for more information before continuing.
Step 2

If you're on notepad, skip to the next step. If you're using TextEdit, we need to make sure you're using plain text instead of rich text. Go to format in the menu bar. If there is an option under format for "Make Rich Text" than you're already using plain text. Don't click anything, just go to the next step. If under format there is an option for "Make Plain Text" then click it.
Step 3

Click and drag your cursor from the end of a line and to the right. This will select the carriage return, the blank space that pushes each email down to the next line. The highlighted carriage return will appear as pictured here. Go to the Edit menu at the top of the screen and select "Copy."
Step 4

Access the "Find and Replace" dialogue by hitting ctrl+f (PC) or command+f (Mac). In the find field, paste the carriage return. It will look blank as pictured here, but it's in there. In the "replace with" field you need to enter a comma immediately followed by a carriage return and then another comma. This will tell the program to find each of the carriage returns and replace them with ,carriagereturn,
Step 5

This reformatted most entries for us. We need to add a final comma to the very beginning of the first entry and one to the very end of the last entry so they both take the form ,email, as the rest of the document should.
Step 6

To finish this document, add this text to the very top: Name,E-mail,Notes followed by a carriage return. This should make your document look like the one pictured here.
Step 7

Go to "File" in the menu bar and click "Save As". Save the document as import.csv
Step 8

Not that our document is formated properly, login to Gmail and click "Contacts" on the left hand side.
Step 9

In the upper left hand corner you'll links to Import, Export and Print. Click "Import" to go to the last step.
Step 10

Click the option to browse for the file and choose "import.csv" If you'd like to import the contacts to a group, you can choose to do that here as well. When you're ready, click the "Import" button. After a short delay, Gmail will prompt you with the number of contacts that were successfully imported.