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
