Important: the legal reality
What follows are the legitimate methods. They're slower than scraping, but they're safe.
Method 1: Export your 1st-degree connections
LinkedIn lets you download a CSV of everyone you're directly connected to — including email addresses for connections who've made theirs visible.
- Go to
linkedin.com/mypreferences/d/download-my-data - Select "Connections" (you can also request full archive)
- Wait 10 minutes — LinkedIn emails you a ZIP
- Open
Connections.csvin Excel or run it through our extractor
You'll get: first name, last name, URL, email address (where shared), company, position, and connected-on date. This is legal use of your own data — no ToS violation.
Method 2: Sales Navigator & Recruiter
LinkedIn's paid tiers (Sales Navigator Core ≈ $100/month, Recruiter Lite ≈ $140/month) provide advanced search and, for connections, email visibility. Third-party tools (e.g. Apollo.io, Hunter, Lusha) integrate with Sales Navigator to enrich profiles with business emails — but these are inference-based and can be inaccurate.
Method 3: Manual copy-paste + our extractor
For small research projects, copying a profile's contact info section (if visible) is fine. Paste everything into our browser-based extractor to pull out any email addresses.
This only works for profiles where the person has publicly shared their email in the About or Contact section. Most haven't.
Method 4: Find the email yourself
You have a name and a company. Common patterns:
firstname.lastname@company.comfirst_initial + lastname(e.g. jdoe@)firstname@company.com(small companies)firstname.lastname-external@(contractors)
Test your guesses with email verification tools (e.g., NeverBounce, ZeroBounce) that do SMTP ping without sending. If it passes, you can email — but keep B2B cold-email rules in mind.
Or skip the guesswork: our cold email legal guide explains when you're allowed to send based on legitimate-interest (GDPR Art. 6(1)(f)) without prior consent.
GDPR compliance checklist
Even legitimately obtained business emails are personal data under GDPR. When you store them:
- Document your legal basis (consent, contract, or legitimate interest — typically the last for B2B)
- Be able to answer a right to information request: "how did you get my email?"
- Honor deletion requests within a month
- Don't store longer than needed
- List "LinkedIn contacts" as a data source in your privacy policy
Where case law stands in 2026
Three developments since hiQ are worth knowing (informational, not legal advice): In Meta v. Bright Data (N.D. Cal., January 2024) the court found that scraping only publicly accessible data without logging in did not breach Meta’s terms. In 2025, LinkedIn settled its case against the data provider Proxycurl with a permanent injunction — Proxycurl deleted all LinkedIn data and shut down. And in Europe, France’s CNIL fined the lead-tool KASPR €240,000 in December 2024 for scraping LinkedIn contact data in breach of the GDPR. The pattern: logged-in scraping and fake accounts lose, and GDPR applies regardless of what US courts say about the ToS question.
FAQ
Is it legal to extract emails from LinkedIn?
Automated scraping violates LinkedIn’s Terms of Service and can get accounts banned or sued, and in Europe collected profile data falls under the GDPR (see the €240,000 CNIL fine against KASPR in 2024). Legally safer routes are the ones described in this guide: exporting your own connections and asking contacts directly.
Can I export the email addresses of my LinkedIn connections?
Yes — LinkedIn’s own data export (Settings → Data privacy → Get a copy of your data) includes your first-degree connections; each contact controls in their privacy settings whether their email is visible to connections in that export.
What happened in hiQ Labs v. LinkedIn in the end?
The Ninth Circuit’s famous holding — scraping publicly available data is not automatically a federal crime — stands. But the case ended in late 2022 with a consent judgment against hiQ for breaching LinkedIn’s terms: a permanent scraping ban, deletion of all data, and a $500,000 payment.
