Reviewed by Shubham Dixit, Independent Expert in Email Forensics and Data File Conversion. Shubham is an external reviewer and not a PCDOTS employee.
Table of Contents
Leaving Mailbird, or just want your contacts in a spreadsheet? Getting your address book out as a CSV is quick, and for most people it is also free. Here is the built in method first, then a fix for when the address book does not hold everyone you actually email.
Summary
To export Mailbird contacts to CSV, open the Contacts manager in Mailbird and use its export option to save the address book as a CSV file. If your saved contacts are incomplete, load your Mailbird emails into a converter and extract addresses straight from the messages instead.
Why export Mailbird contacts to CSV?
A CSV file is just a plain text spreadsheet, one contact per row, fields split by commas. Almost everything reads it, which is exactly why it is the format people reach for when moving contacts around.
- Switching email clients. Outlook, Thunderbird and Gmail all import contacts from CSV, so it is the universal handoff format when you leave Mailbird.
- Backup. A CSV of your address book is a tiny, future proof copy you can store anywhere.
- Cleanup and bulk edits. Once contacts sit in a spreadsheet you can sort, deduplicate and fix them far faster than inside any email client.
- Importing into other tools. CRMs, mailing list managers and databases all take CSV, so your contacts become useful well beyond email.
The free built in way to export Mailbird contacts
Start here, because for a lot of people this is all you need and it costs nothing. Mailbird has a contacts manager with its own export.
- Open Mailbird and go to the Contacts area from the sidebar.
- Open the contacts menu and look for the Export option.
- Choose CSV as the format when prompted.
- Pick a save location and confirm. Your saved contacts land in a CSV file.
If every person you deal with is saved in your Mailbird address book, you are done right here. Open the CSV, tidy it and import it wherever you need. No software, no cost.
The gap in the built in export
Here is the part worth knowing before you trust that file. The built in export only gives you contacts you actually saved to the address book. And most of us never save most of the people we email.
Think about it. Years of clients, suppliers and colleagues you replied to without ever clicking add to contacts. None of them are in the address book, so none of them are in that CSV. The native export is honest, it just cannot give you what was never saved in the first place.
“The real address book is the mailbox, not the contacts list. People save a fraction of who they correspond with. When I need a complete picture of someone’s network, I pull addresses from the actual sent and received mail, not the saved contacts. That is where the people who matter actually are.”
Shubham Dixit · Independent Expert, Email Forensics and Data File Conversion
How to pull every address out of your emails?
When the saved address book is not enough, the fix is to harvest addresses from the messages themselves. The PCDOTS Email Converter reads your Mailbird data and can either export the address book to CSV or extract every address found across your actual emails, including the people you never saved.
Runs on Windows 11, 10, 8.1 and earlier. Free demo handles 10 items per run.
The flow is short. Open the tool, go to Desktop Email Clients and choose Mailbird Accounts, then load your data from the configured account or a folder. Preview what loaded, then take one of two routes. For a straight address book dump, pick CSV from the Export menu. To capture everyone you ever wrote to, use the Extract menu and choose Email Addresses, which scans the From, To, Cc and Bcc fields of every message.
Mailbird folders loaded, ready for CSV export or address extraction.
That extraction route is the same technique we used in the Opera Mail address extraction guide, just pointed at Mailbird. If you need attachments or phone numbers too, the same Extract menu pulls those separately.
Cleaning up the CSV before you import it
Whichever route you used, give the file a quick pass before importing it anywhere. Two minutes here saves a messy contact list later.
- Remove duplicates. Use your spreadsheet’s remove duplicates tool so one person is not three rows.
- Drop the noise. Strip noreply, notification and automated addresses if you extracted from emails. They are not real contacts.
- Check the headers. Make sure the column names match what your target app expects, for example Name and Email, before importing.
People also ask
Does Mailbird have a built in contacts export?
Yes. Mailbird’s contacts manager can export your saved address book to CSV for free. The limit is that it only includes contacts you actually saved, not everyone you have emailed.
How do I get contacts I never saved to the address book?
Load your Mailbird emails into a converter and use its extract option to pull addresses from the From, To, Cc and Bcc fields of every message. That captures people who were never added as saved contacts.
What is a CSV file and why use it for contacts?
A CSV is a plain text spreadsheet with one contact per row and fields separated by commas. Nearly every email client, CRM and database can import it, which makes it the standard format for moving contacts between tools.
Can I import the CSV into Outlook or Gmail?
Yes. Both Outlook and Gmail have a contacts import feature that accepts CSV files. Match your column headers to what they expect and the contacts load straight in.
Do I need Mailbird installed to extract the contacts?
For the built in export, yes, Mailbird has to be running. For the converter route, no. It reads your Mailbird data from a copied folder, so even data from an old machine works.
The short version
So exporting Mailbird contacts to CSV is genuinely easy, and for a saved address book the free built in export is all you need. The catch is that it only knows the contacts you saved, which is usually a fraction of who you actually email. When you want everyone, extracting addresses from the messages themselves fills the gap. Either way, a quick spreadsheet cleanup turns the raw file into a contact list worth keeping.
Is your saved address book complete, or are most of your contacts hiding in old emails?
