List Contact Emails Using Apex

When working with Salesforce data, it’s common to pull related information across objects. One useful scenario is retrieving the email addresses of all contacts related to a specific Account  maybe to send notifications, reports, or alerts.

In this blog post, we’ll write a simple Apex method that does exactly that. It takes an Account’s name, queries all Contacts under it, and returns a list of their email addresses.

If you’re new to Apex or want a real-world example of using SOQL (Salesforce Object Query Language), this one’s for you!

🧠 What Are We Trying to Do?

Let’s say you have a customer account named “Acme Inc”, and you want to get the email addresses of all contacts who work for them.

We’re going to:

• Accept an account name as input.

• Query all Contact records related to that account.

• Collect all the non-null email addresses.

• Return them in a List<String>.

This kind of logic is great for background processing, sending emails, or even building custom reports.

🔍 Code Explanation

public with sharing class ApexUseCaseFour {
    public static List<String> returnContactEmails(String accountName){

We start by defining a class ApexUseCaseFour with a static method returnContactEmails. It accepts the Account’s name as a String.

        List<String> emailList = new List<String>();

We create an empty list that will store all email addresses we collect.

        List<Contact> contactRecords = [SELECT Id, Email FROM Contact WHERE Account.Name = :accountName];

This is the key part: we run a SOQL query to fetch all Contacts where the Account’s Name matches the input. We’re selecting only the fields we need: Id and Email.

💡 Note: We’re using a relationship field here: Account.Name — this is how we filter child records (Contact) by a parent field (Account.Name).

        if(contactRecords.size() > 0){
            for(Contact con : contactRecords){
                if(con.Email != null){
                    emailList.add(con.Email);
                }
            }
        }

We loop through the result set. For each contact, we check if the email is not null and then add it to our list.

        return emailList;
    }
}

At the end, we return the list of collected email addresses.

✅ Why This Is Useful

This method is super helpful in real-world scenarios like:

• Sending email alerts to everyone associated with a particular customer.

• Generating reports based on active client contacts.

• Automating communication via Apex.

It also introduces a basic but powerful concept: querying related records using SOQL  something you’ll use all the time as a Salesforce developer.

🧾 Final Code Snippet

public with sharing class ApexUseCaseFour {
    
    public static List<String> returnContactEmails(String accountName){
        List<String> emailList = new List<String>();
        
        List<Contact> contactRecords = [SELECT Id, Email FROM Contact WHERE Account.Name = :accountName];
        if(contactRecords.size() > 0){
            for(Contact con : contactRecords){
                if(con.Email != null){
                    emailList.add(con.Email);
                }
            }
        }
        return emailList;
    }
}

🎥 Watch It in Action!

If you’re more of a visual learner, I’ve got you covered. Here’s a quick video walkthrough of how this Apex method works in Salesforce.