Daniel - September 25, 2019
How to Scrape Emails from LinkedIn
Looking to extract emails from LinkedIn profiles? Here’s a tutorial for you. Herein, we’ll be showing you how to scrape emails from LinkedIn.
LinkedIn is widely regarded as the foremost networking platform for professionals, students, and business owners; boasting of hundreds of millions of active users across the globe. The platform is primarily designed to establish connection and facilitate interaction between people of like minds and interests. And while this purpose is being served (by LinkedIn), in due capacity, many people seek to interact more intimately with their connections – via emails – for one reason or another.
The foregoing is what birth the idea of scraping emails from LinkedIn. And many individuals and corporate LinkedIn users have successfully used (and are still using) this method to establish more personal connections between and among themselves.
In essence, whether you’re looking to scrape emails from one, two or all of your LinkedIn connections, this guide will show you how to go about it. Read on!
Why scrape emails from LinkedIn: Is it legal?
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Email scraping basically entails harvesting or extracting email IDs from the internet. The procedure is widely used by email spammers, in the cyber-world. And in most cases, depending on the intention behind the act, it’s classified as a cybercrime – specifically a breach of privacy and data theft.
Emails are typically scraped using a set of bots and/or crawlers, which harvest emails to build/compile an email list. Harvested emails and the corresponding list are usually sold to marketers and other interest groups. And LinkedIn, which hosts millions of professional email addresses, is arguably the most targeted platform today.
LinkedIn, as an interactive platform, requires email ID for registration; and with respect to its mammoth userbase – numbering hundreds of millions – email spammers see it as the perfect avenue to harvest or scrape emails of unsuspecting victims. And while there is a standard measure in place to guard against this, spammers are still having a field day.
Basically, a LinkedIn user may not want his/her email ID made public – for privacy reasons nonetheless. Hence, LinkedIn provides an avenue to block out such email IDs from public view. This way, anyone who wants your email address would have to ask for it directly, or go the unethical way of “scraping” it off your profile.
However, some people may seek to scrape emails from their LinkedIn connections, without any sinister motive; but rather for non-intrusive ad campaigns or even for recruitment purpose. Here, email scraping may seem “ethical”, but it’s still a violation of users’ privacy, which is considered illegal.
In essence, scraping emails from LinkedIn or from any other platform is widely considered a cybercrime. However, its efficiency in establishing prospecting professional relationships between LinkedIn users cannot be thrown out of the window. So, while it may be considered illegal, it’s ethical coloration remains a controversial issue.
How to scrape emails from LinkedIn
There are several ways of scraping emails from LinkedIn, and most methods typically involve the use of bots and crawlers. However, before going the “illegal” or rather “unethical” line, LinkedIn provides a direct avenue to export and download email IDs from the platform, with due permissions nonetheless.
Therefore, in this section, we’ll be recommending the conventional method provided by LinkedIn, before going the advanced way.
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1. Manually export LinkedIn connections
This, as pointed out earlier, is the appropriate technique for scraping emails from LinkedIn. And it also serves as the safest method for extracting email IDs from your connections’ profiles.
However, it’s important to note that there is a new privacy measure (setting) on LinkedIn, which provides only privileged access to users’ email IDs. The new setting, tagged – Who can download your email – is configured, by default, to the strongest privacy; such that only a handful of connections, with permission privileges, are given access to your email ID. In fact, you can easily configure the setting to ensure your email ID is never compromised on the platform.
Also, LinkedIn users can reconfigure the setting from the “strong privacy” option to a weaker one; to enable their connections extract their email IDs, provided prior permission has been granted to such connections.
With this new privacy setup, you’d only be able to extract few email IDs (if any) off your connection list. Put aptly, you won’t be able to extract the email IDs of users who have this new setting enabled on their accounts.
In any case, below are step-by-step guidelines to export LinkedIn connections and extract their email IDs:
Open LinkedIn and sign in as prompted – with your email ID and password.
Navigate your way to the home page.
Locate the Me icon on the homepage and tap on it.
In the next window, select Settings & Privacy from the dropdown menu.
Tap on the Privacy tab (at the top) in the prompted window.
Locate the How LinkedIn uses your data section, and tap on Change, next to the Download your data option, underneath it.
Sign in (if prompted).
After signing in (as prompted), you’d be automatically redirected to a data page tagged – Download your data page.
On the data page, select target Connections, whose email IDs you seek to extract.
Follow the on-screen instructions to finish up.
After running the above procedure, an email will be sent to you (via your registered email address). In the email would be a link, from where you can extract the data you need.
Also, it’s important to note that you can only extract email IDs from your direct connections. And even at that, you can only extract few emails, which could be insufficient to satisfy your need. Hence, to gain full access to all your connections’ emails, you’d have to look outward.
2. Use automated tools to scrape emails from LinkedIn
This is the more advanced technique, which is mainly employed where/when the “in-app” method fails. Here, third-party email scraping tools are employed to infiltrate and extract email IDs from target LinkedIn profiles. However, the use of automated scraping tools is widely considered unethical (even illegal) in most cybersecurity fora.
There are numerous tools available for scraping emails from LinkedIn. Some of these tools are paid, while others are available for free. And interestingly, the free ones are not necessarily substandard, compared to their licensed (paid) counterparts.
Below are brief outlines of four top automated tools for scraping emails from LinkedIn:
PhantomBuster
PhantomBuster is also known as a “LinkedIn profile scraper”; and it’s widely used – by corporate groups and individuals – to scrape emails and other vital info from LinekdIn. The tool is commonly used by HR analysts and recruiters, to collate valuable information (like email addresses) about prospective employees/applicants.
This automation tool is basically designed as an API; which, when integrated with LinkedIn, infiltrates a target LinkedIn profile, and extracts all valuable data, including email IDs. In fact, if target profiles are owned by “direct (first-degree) connections”, you can even extract phone numbers from such profiles.
However, extraction of email IDs from “indirect connections” is somewhat tricky, and can only be executed in “Email Discovery” mode. In this mode, you can extract email IDs from any LinkedIn profile, in quick time.
Interestingly, the entire process is cloud-based; so, you don’t need to keep a close watch during the email discovery and subsequent scraping stages.
Lastly, this PhantomBuster is proprietary-licensed; however, you can enjoy the service for free (on trial), for a limited period of two weeks (14 days). You can get the tool from the designated website, and follow the screen prompts to set it up.
Skrapp.io
Skrapp is another popular LinkedIn automation tool, widely used for scraping emails off LinkedIn profiles. It’s a comprehensive browser (Chrome) extension, which can integrate seamlessly with a number of platforms – notably LinkedIn and Sales Navigator.
The Chrome extension is widely used by digital marketers and HR analysts to extract emails from LinkedIn among other platforms. There is also a designated “email finder”, which can help you find emails and compile a mailing list in quick time.
Furthermore, you are afforded the opportunity of saving extracted email lists in CSV or XLSX formats; with an inbuilt engine for sieving out duplicates.
Skrapp offers a freemium package, with five basic plans on offer. The free package supports up to 150 emails per month (per user), while the premium editions start at $49 – with support for up to 1000 emails per month.
Get started, and subscribe to a plan now.
GetProspect.io
GetProspect is another automation tool, which is commonly used to scrape emails from LinkedIn. This tool, like others, is a Chrome extension, which can easily be adapted to extract B2B contacts/emails from the net.
The tool integrates seamlessly with LinkedIn (and other platforms like Salesforce), and exports inherent emails to XLS file. With this integration, you get the opportunity to scrape and export up to 50,000 emails per month. And with a success rate of 98% (2% bounce rate), your lead generation (as a marketer) would be boosted significantly.
Like Skrapp, GetProspect is available as a freemium package; with a free version that supports extraction of up to 150 emails per month. On the other hand, the premium edition starts at $29 – supporting up to 1000 emails per month – and the largest plan (High Volume), which supports up to 50,000 emails per month, goes for $299.
You can get started by signing up on the platform, and subscribing to a plan.
SalesQL
SalesQL is a free “LinkedIn email finder”, widely used by sales reps and recruiters for extracting email IDs from LinkedIn. The tool is a Chrome extension, which is highly adaptable for finding and harvesting verified email IDs from LinkedIn profiles.
SalesQL is standard enough to scrape email ID from any LinkedIn profile; whether a first-grade connection or not. And with its relatively low-bouncing rate, you can generate useful leads (as a marketer) and attract the best candidates (as a recruiter).
Furthermore, extracted LinkedIn profiles and emails can easily be exported from CSV/Excel, to ATS (HR software)/CRM (sales/marketing software). This facilitates the apt management of all extracted emails, making your workflow extremely easy.
SalesQL, as pointed out earlier is a Chrome extension; hence, it’s available for installation on Google Chrome’s Webstore. After installation, you can sign up and subscribe to the free plan (with 100 free credit/month), albeit with limited access. To gain access to the full service, you’d have to upgrade to a premium edition.
Subscribe to a plan now, and start scraping emails from LinkedIn; to boost your sales, or hire the best hands for your team.
Updated – Added ContactOut
Another tool for scraping emails from LinkedIn is ContactOut. It incorporates an AI engine which makes it works faster than other tools mentioned earlier.
It has a user-friendly dashboard that allows you to access all scraped email addresses without hassles. You can better organize these email addresses into folders.
Additionally, ContactOut has a search portal that allows you to source for email addresses quickly. Likewise, ContactOut has a Google Chrome extension which will enable you to scrape email addresses directly as you browse. Not to mention, you can export your results in ATS or spreadsheet files.
Aside from LinkedIn, ContactOut can also be used to scrape emails from GitHub. With ContactOut, you can save entire user-profiles and emails as you browse LinkedIn. The software is not free, but the pricing plans are not public. You’ll need to contact the company to find out the cost.
Conclusion
LinkedIn is a large social media platform with so many users that are focused on career and professional growth. It’s an excellent platform for connecting with employees, employers, influencers, and likes in your business niche.
To reach them, the best way is via email, and not all LinkedIn users would make their email address viewable on the platform. With the help of the tools and software discussed in this post, you should be able to scrape any email address from LinkedIn.
Checkout this article on the 9 Most Effective LinkedIn Lead Generation Strategies
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