An Introduction to LinkedIn Email Scraping

Listen in! Pick up some expert advice to a reader's question that we selected from CyberSchmooz.

LinkedIn is an avenue for top-level influencers, decision-makers, discussion, research, etc. 79% of marketers find this social network for professionas an effective marketing and sales channel (according to HubSpot).

Nonetheless, to reach a potential client, you’d require to connect with them. As most people would hide their personal details for privacy concerns, email scraping is a handy means to achieve that goal and connect with your prospects using email.

So if you’ve been thinking of the means to scrape qualified emails from LinkedIn for your outreach campaigns, this article is for you.

What is Data Scraping?

Data (and email) scraping is the process of automatic data extraction from websites and storing it for later use. Data scraping is often achieved by following specific algorithms and gets exported into a CSV file to facilitate the process of collection, storing, and processing.

LinkedIn Policy and Email Scraping

When talking about scraping, many are often under the delusion that it is an illicit activity.

But let’s get a new angle on data scraping:

Search engines (like Google and Bing) and their crawlers are nothing but scraping algorithms that collect data to gather web pages and their content to include in search results.

Some scientific studies also use scraping to collect data online for their research.

LinkedIn acknowledges that scraping can be used for legitimate purposes. Nonetheless, the company does its best to ensure LinkedIn profiles' info remains secure. For that, they make it possible for the platform’s users to restrict access to their data from the profile settings.

According to Forbes, an appeals court ruled in April 2022 that web scraping is legal, including data scraping from LinkedIn.

Nevertheless, we’d recommend using tried-and-tested means only to avoid getting blocked by internal LinkedIn algorithms.

Means to Scrape Emails from LinkedIn

There are a few safe ways to extract emails from this platform. Their choice depends on the purpose, the number of emails you would like to access, and whether a LinkedIn profile is your connection or not.

We’ve cherry-picked the following options for you:

Use Linked Helper 2 — LinkedIn Automation and Scraping Tool

This non-cloud software has been built to ensure no LinkedIn algorithms get violated while automating a variety of your day-to-day activities, including scraping data from LinkedIn.

Unlike Chrome extensions, the tool runs in a LinkedIn window in the overlay mode, meaning you’ll need to install it on your PC. By repeating human actions and with the help of action limitations, Linked Helper is a 100% secure means to use for LinkedIn automation and scraping.

Besides email and data scraping, the software allows you to:

Grow your network by inviting second and third-level contacts
Send personalized messages, InMails, and connection requests
Build drip campaigns with smart replies
Export data in a CSV file
Set weekly invitation limits, etc.

For more details on how Linked Helper 2 assists in email scraping on Linkedin, visit the site.

Scrape Emails Manually

In fact, before 2018, it was not a big deal to extract emails from LinkedIn. But then, the platform made significant changes to its privacy policy, all done to prevent spam attempts.

What has changed since then?

LinkedIn users gain the possibility to block their info from being shared and extracted. Meaning, a user would need to specifically go to their settings and choose to allow their direct and first-degree connections access their information.

Thus, if you succeed in scraping emails manually, the chances are some of them will be missing.

To access the LinkedIn setting that allows you to extract data from the platform, you’ll need to log in to your LinkedIn account. Please note the steps described in this post cover the desktop layout only.

The procedure:

In the upper-right corner, under the profile icon, click the Me arrow.
Under Account, click Settings & Privacy.
In the left pane, navigate to Data privacy.
Under How LinkedIn uses your data, click the Get a copy of your data tab. The Export your data option will become available.
You’ll see two options. The first one is to download a larger amount of data, including your connections and contacts. The second one is to extract some particular information, such as articles, invitations, connections, etc.

The process of extracting information from LinkedIn depends on the amount of data you choose to scrape and can take from 10 minutes to 24 hours.

Wrap Up

We hope this article has managed to highlight email scraping means on LinkedIn that will let you effortlessly find addresses that you need.

So now that you know how to scrape emails, prospecting clients and companies will become a piece of cake for you.

DISCLAIMER: We hope whatever you find on this site is helpful, but be cautioned that it may not apply to your own situation, or be totally current at any given time. Idea Cafe Inc. and all of its current and past experts, sponsors, advertisers, agents, contractors and advisors disclaim all warranties with regard to anything found anywhere on this family of websites, quoted from, or sent from Idea Cafe. and its related sites, publications and companies. We also take no responsibility for comments published by others on these pages.

TRADEMARKS: The following are Registered Trademarks or Servicemarks of DevStart, Inc.: Idea Cafe®, Online Coffee Break®, The Small Business Gathering Place®, Take out Info®, Biz Bar & Grill®, Complaint-O-Meter®, A Fun Approach to Serious Business™, CyberSchmooz™, and BizCafe™.