Extract Email Addresses

Email addresses turn up everywhere: in long threads with many people copied in, in sign-up exports, in a page of staff profiles or in the source of an old newsletter. Copying them one by one misses some and duplicates others. Paste the whole thing here and get a clean list.

What counts as an address

The extractor looks for the shape of an address: a local part made of letters, digits and the symbols that addresses may contain (dots, plus signs, hyphens, underscores and a few more), an @, and a domain made of labels separated by dots, ending in a top-level domain such as .com, .org or .co.uk. It works in plain text, in HTML source where addresses sit inside mailto: links and angle brackets, and in CSV exports. Surrounding quotes, brackets and trailing punctuation are not taken as part of the address.

Obfuscated addresses

Websites often write addresses as “press [at] example [dot] com” to keep spam robots away. With “Read name [at] site [dot] com” on, the common forms with square brackets, round brackets or the words at and dot are decoded into real addresses. Turn it off if your text uses those words in ordinary sentences and produces false matches.

Duplicates and case

The same person often appears several times, with different capitalisation. Lowercasing merges those variants, and removing duplicates keeps each address once. The counters show how many addresses were found in total and how many are unique, so you can see how much repetition there was.

Ready for your email program

Choose one address per line for a spreadsheet, commas for the Gmail and most webmail To: fields, or semicolons for Outlook. Ordering by domain groups colleagues from the same company, and the domain filter keeps only addresses from one organisation, for example to find everyone from a partner company in a long thread. The domain table shows how many addresses each organisation contributed.

Consent and privacy

Having an address is not permission to send marketing email to it. Under the GDPR, the CAN-SPAM Act and similar laws, people need to have agreed, or have an existing relationship with you, before you add them to a mailing list. Use extracted lists for replying, organising events or cleaning up your own contacts. The extraction itself runs in your browser and nothing you paste is uploaded.

Checking the result

The extractor finds text that looks like an address; it does not contact any mail server, so a typo such as gmial.com is still listed. Scan the list, especially the domain table, for misspellings before sending.

A worked example

Take a short thread: “please reply to [email protected] or [email protected]”, then “cc: [email protected]”, then “press [at] example [dot] com”. With the default settings the result has three addresses: [email protected] once, [email protected] and [email protected]. The total counter says four were found, the unique counter says three, and the domain table shows example.com twice and example.org once. Switching the separator to commas gives a line you can paste straight into the To: field.

Related tools

Collect the links from the same text with Extract URLs, gather phone numbers with Extract Numbers, and join the list with any separator using Column to Comma-Separated List.