Extracting Email Addresses from Text
Paste text, a document, an exported spreadsheet or raw HTML and this tool pulls out every email address it contains, lowercased and deduplicated. Everything runs in your browser, so nothing you paste is transmitted anywhere.
The privacy point is not incidental here. Text containing email addresses is usually text you should be careful with — a contact export, a support thread, a client document — and pasting it into a tool that uploads to a server would be a poor idea.
Legitimate uses
- Consolidating contacts from a document, email thread or exported report into a clean list.
- Pulling addresses out of a spreadsheet column that mixes emails with other text.
- Auditing your own site's HTML to find email addresses exposed in plain text.
- Collecting the addresses from a form submission export or a support ticket dump.
- Deduplicating a contact list assembled from several sources.
Scraping and the law
Worth being direct about: harvesting email addresses to send unsolicited bulk email is illegal in most jurisdictions and is not a use this tool is intended for.
Under GDPR, an email address is personal data. Collecting it requires a lawful basis, and “I found it on a website” is not one. Under CAN-SPAM in the US, harvesting addresses from websites is specifically called out, and penalties apply per message. PECR in the UK requires consent for marketing email to individuals.
The practical line is between organising contacts you already have a relationship with or a legitimate reason to hold, and building a list of strangers to email. The first is ordinary admin; the second creates real legal exposure and does not work well anyway.
Finding exposed addresses on your own site
The genuinely useful SEO-adjacent use is auditing your own pages. Email addresses written in plain text in HTML get harvested by spam bots continuously, and a support address published five years ago is often the reason a mailbox is unusable.
Running your page source through this shows what is exposed. The fixes are a contact form instead of a published address, or obfuscation — though obfuscation is a delaying tactic rather than a solution, since scrapers handle common techniques.
For a broader audit of what a page exposes and how it is structured, the On-Page SEO Analyzer fetches and parses the live HTML.
How the matching works
The tool matches the standard email pattern: a local part, an @ sign, a domain with at least one dot, and a top-level domain of two or more letters. Results are lowercased, since email domains are case-insensitive and local parts are treated as such by essentially every provider.
Deduplication happens after lowercasing, so Support@Example.com and support@example.com return once.
The pattern is deliberately conservative. It will miss deliberately obfuscated addresses written as “name at example dot com”, and it will not match addresses using unusual but technically valid characters. Being slightly conservative produces fewer false positives, which matters more than catching every edge case.
What it will not catch
- Obfuscated addresses written as “name at example dot com” or with HTML entities.
- Addresses assembled by JavaScript at page load, which are not in the source text.
- Addresses inside images, which is exactly why some sites publish them that way.
- Internationalised addresses using non-ASCII characters.
- Addresses split across lines by word wrapping in the pasted source.
Related extraction tools
The Extract URLs from Text tool works the same way for links, which is useful when auditing the same source for both — contact pages typically expose addresses and links together.
For cleaning up the extracted list, the Remove Duplicate Lines and Sort Keywords Alphabetically tools handle general list tidying, since both work on any line-separated list rather than only keywords.
Frequently asked questions
Is my text uploaded anywhere?
No. Extraction runs entirely in your browser and nothing is transmitted or stored. That matters here more than with most tools, since text containing email addresses is usually sensitive.
Is it legal to extract email addresses from websites?
Extracting is not itself the issue; what you do next is. Sending unsolicited bulk email to harvested addresses breaches GDPR, CAN-SPAM and PECR depending on jurisdiction. Organising contacts you already have a legitimate reason to hold is fine.
Why does it miss some addresses?
The pattern is deliberately conservative to avoid false positives. It skips obfuscated formats like “name at example dot com”, addresses assembled by JavaScript, addresses inside images, and non-ASCII internationalised addresses.
Are results deduplicated?
Yes, after lowercasing. Support@Example.com and support@example.com are recognised as the same address and returned once.
How do I stop my own address being harvested?
Use a contact form rather than publishing the address in plain text. Obfuscation techniques delay scrapers rather than stopping them, since the common methods are widely handled.