How to extract names and email addresses from your WP database
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I had to do some playing around with my wordpress database when I wanted to move my install from a shared hosting to a dedicated server (which turned out to be quite easy!) and I went in a bit further to phpmyadmin to see what other things I could do.
With the current release of my new contest game, Aqua Craft, I wanted to let everyone that has visited here know about it and rather than wait for every single commenter to come back and see the post, I thought it might be easier to extract the email addresses of all commenters from the database and send them all a message. (luckily, only one person replied saying it was spam!).
I checked my wp_comments table and it had a few thousand entries, yey! I thought. I’ll send them all a message! I extracted the table into a csv file and was disappointed to see literally hundreds and hundreds of spammer email addresses in there…
Not being a mysql database geek, I did some searching and found a way to extract all the addresses of the commenters that had been approved… here’s how…
1.) Log in to phpmyadmin
2.) select the wp_comments table on the left and click the “browse” button on comment_author_email
3.) Click “edit” on the mysql statment at the top of the page and change it to the following
SELECT * FROM `wp_comments` WHERE `comment_approved` = ‘1′
That will show you a list of all the comments made that have been approved.
4.) Click on the “export” tab and select these options..
This will give you a large .csv file ready to be opened by Excel
5.) Open the file in excel which will give you this..
This is a lot more than we need, so delete the columns for comment id, comment content etc so you’re left with comment_author, comment_author_email and comment_author_url
6.) Your excel file should look like this…
Now there will be a lot of duplicate email addresses from multiple commenters but if you have a decent newsletter or mass email program, you should be able to import this file and let it filter out all the dupes and discard the trackbacks and pings.
Easy peasy! I ended up with a few hundred email addresses who I could tell about my latest contest.. awesome…
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Tags: comment, email, extract, mysql, phpmyadmin, Wordpress
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March 28th, 2008 at 1:42 am
So that’s how you did it, you cheeky sod
Am going to reply to you, when I have enough time to forumlate a proper reply to you
Rhys’s last blog post..Music Sounds Better With You - Three Most Embarrassing Songs on my Playlist
March 28th, 2008 at 10:29 am
March 29th, 2008 at 5:19 pm
Excellent tutorial! Bookmarked
March 30th, 2008 at 10:47 am
Very cool idea! I’ve messed around in phpmyadmin for a while now but am afraid to screw things up. I’ve thought about trying to get a email list before - this is a great way. Thanks Andy:)
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March 30th, 2008 at 10:53 am
April 7th, 2008 at 4:04 am
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May 26th, 2008 at 8:09 am
well written message,well done
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June 25th, 2008 at 11:59 pm
You’ve got balls Andy!
I would not even think of doing that. Just the thought of a spam complaint will send me running. I have come about a related blog post about different plugins that are available that can handle one’s list building from your blog. And I must say that I have been impressed. There are such a lot that I just there and then thought - may be later - and closed the window.
I use aweber and I must say that is over there - at the top. Since I currently have bandwidth problems to sort out I sort of hang around until I can figure out my problems…
In the mean time - how dedicated did you go and why?
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