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Extract emails from a website, or from 1,000: three methods compared

By Keencrest · 2026-11-01

"Extract emails from a website" covers three different jobs: one page once, a few sites a week, or hundreds at a time. The right tool differs for each.

1. One page, once: the browser

Open the page, press Ctrl+F and search for "@". Also check the footer and the contact page. Addresses written as "name [at] domain" or shown as an image will not match. This takes a minute and costs nothing; do it for a handful of sites.

2. A few sites a week: browser extensions

Extensions list emails visible on the page you are on. They are convenient but see only that page, work one tab at a time, and many free tiers cap monthly lookups. Fine for prospecting while you browse.

3. Hundreds of sites: a scraper

A scraper follows the contact, about, team and privacy pages of each site so you get addresses the home page does not show. Our Website Contact Details Scraper takes a list of URLs and returns one row per site. In a test on stripe.com it returned two addresses and a phone from a four-page crawl; on basecamp.com it returned one; docker.com published none, and the run said so instead of guessing.

{"websites": ["https://basecamp.com"], "maxPagesPerSite": 4}

What none of them can do

No tool can find an email that the site does not publish. If a site only has a contact form, you will get no address; guessing patterns (first.last@) bounces often and harms your sender reputation. Use a form-fill or LinkedIn for those.

Which to pick

VolumeMethod
1 to 10 sitesCtrl+F
10 to 50 a weekExtension
50+ or recurringScraper Actor, $0.002 per site with an email

How often a small-business site gives an email (measured)

On 2 November 2026 we ran Website Contact Details Scraper on 124 small-business websites taken from Google Maps listings (plumbers, dentists, electricians, accountants and hair salons in mid-size cities). 84 of them (68%) returned an email, and every one of those 84 had a domain that accepts mail. A second run gave the same result row for row.

CountrySitesWith an email
United States4029 (73%)
Australia2119 (90%)
Germany2118 (86%)
United Kingdom2111 (52%)
Canada217 (33%)
All12484 (68%)

The samples are small (21 sites for each country outside the US), so treat the per-country figures as rough. Most misses (23 of 34) were sites that publish only a contact or booking form (how to list the contact forms for those sites). 4 sites asked crawlers not to visit in robots.txt and were skipped. Businesses with no website at all were not in the sample. Sites that give no email are not billed.

Since build 0.7.19 the same run also returns, free, each site's contact-page URL and form kind (contactPageUrl, contactFormKind). In a later run on the same kind of list (2 November 2026, 124 sites), 23 of the 38 sites that had no email came back with their contact-form URL and kind. See find contact forms on a list of websites.

For a whole list, see the list walkthrough. No list yet? The same Actor takes an industry and a city (searchQueries, such as plumbers in Denver, CO), finds the businesses on Google Maps and then reads their sites; see the contractor, dentist and roofing guides.

Want it done for you? Send us your list of websites and get the company mailboxes back as a CSV ($49 per 1,000 sites).

Try it: Website Contact Details Scraper on Apify. $0.002 per site with an email, nothing for sites without. The Apify free plan includes monthly credit, so a test run costs nothing out of pocket.

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