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…