Email Scraping Tools That Work

I hope you find value in my resource that attempts to outline some email scraping tools that work.

I’ve been doing SEO and digital marketing since 2002 and even back then we’d scrape the web for emails to send out – well – cold emails. Back in the day email scraping tools were very simple and you’d just have to find the “@” symbol in HTML and scrape (or harvest) the results. These days it’s become more sophisticated and in this post, I’ll outline a bunch of tools that I’ve used with success.

Scraping emails for lead generation is as old as the hills, in fact, I’d even suggest that this growth hack might even be “the” original black hat marketing trick.

There are hundreds of solutions to effectively scrape emails but in this resource, I’ll share two personal favorites.

Does Scraping For Emails Still Work?

Yes.

Email continues to live on!

It looks like email will never die!

Email is a dependable protocol, it isn’t owned by a corporation, and nor does it exist for a single provider – this means that its wide usage continues unabated every year. It does not exist. Email is cheap, indeed all you need is a web connection and you’re good to go, and that’s why it continues to be the world’s most popular and widely used communication tool.

Sure, there are other messaging apps, especially mobile apps (some of which are encrypted), but they will never (as far as I can see) surpass the humble electronic message – “email”.

Every second is sent 2.4 billion emails. Every year this is 74 trillion emails!

So – that is great news for us SEO and growth hackers!

However, what about the tech?

Well, it continues to be a “cat and mouse” game with developers, ISPs, and blackhat marketers.

Rather than get into the tech, let’s just review some tools that get the job done when we need tools to be able to scrape emails that we can then send cold email outreach to.

Email Scraping Tools That Work #1 Scrapebox

The first one is to use Scrapebox.

Scrapebox (this is their site) is an ‘old school’ classic growth marketers’ tool that I discovered about ten years ago on BlackHatWorld.

Using Scrapebox and of course proxies (preferably residential ones) you can easily find emails that are published on any online HTML resource.

This post isn’t designed to be a tutorial as such, I just wanted to outline the tools that I’ve been using to great success over the last 15 years.

You’ll need to watch the tutorial to fully understand how it works but essentially it really is a ‘plug and play’ solution.

The “issue” with the above Scrapebox approach is that a lot of the emails will be generic, i.e. “info@” addresses so I’d advise to not set too much expectation on getting results from those addresses.

Email Scraping Tools That Work #2 Phantombuster

The other, much easier solution that does NOT need proxies is my second favorite: phantombuster.

I refer to phantombuster often throughout my site, and it gets a special feature and mention on my recommended SEO Tools, and that’s because it packs a massive punch in that it is super easy to use because it is a pre-made scraper and email matcher.

All you need to do is connect a Google sheet (make it public) with two columns.

• Column A with your prospects name
• Column B with their company

The tool will now try and enumerate those email handles by pinging the associated servers to see whether they can establish that there is a user with that handle.

When using phantombuster you will also need an account with either EmailHunter or with Dropcontact; since either of those tools will do the actual API validation.

Personally, I prefer Dropcontact because they are less expensive compared to EmailHunter and their support is excellent.

So, it’s simple: once you’ve got going with this growth hack then it will become a straightforward task to automate and bake into your overall outreach workflow.

Email Scraping Tools That Work #3 Dropcontact

Whilst not strictly speaking an “email scraping tool” I’ve used this service a lot and it works very well.

Basically, what you do is upload your spreadsheet with the same columns as per the last paragraph, i.e. by Column A and B (prospects name and company respectively), and submit – and – that’s it!

It’s a very simple service and for the most part, it is very successful and being able to find emails.

Which Do I Prefer – And Why?

Between the three that I’ve listed, I’d suggest using phantombuster for personal or highly targeted outreach and I’d suggest to use Scrapebox for scraping emails out of Instagram (for example).

Dropcontact is another excellent service that I’d encourage you to try for your email marketing growth hacks.