Is Email Scraping Legal? What You Should Know Before You Scrape a Website

A large factor of your ongoing success in business comes from the ability to reach new potential clients. And in today’s digital world, getting access to someone’s email address is a clear way to market to them and grow future sales. If you have an offer for a specific customer, then finding the email address for decision-makers and getting right in front of them is your best shot at growing the company.

Thus, having a sizable email list is instrumental to scale your business. This is the hard part, though. Many business owners don’t even know where to start to begin gathering hundreds - or thousands - of email addresses from people in their target audience. After all, you can’t just download a list of these email addresses online...or can you?

Luckily for businesses, email scraping tools have grown in popularity recently. These make it effortless to scrape websites like LinkedIn for email addresses. Or, you can scrape email addresses from specific company domains.

The power of email scraping is vast - but this relatively new, uncertain tactic has many wondering…is email scraping legal? 

Continue reading through this guide as we cover everything you need to know before you scrape a website, and explain how you can legally find email addresses and other web data online. First things first - what exactly is email scraping?

What Exactly is Email Scraping?

Before we discuss is it legal to scrape a website, let’s talk about what is an email scraper in the first place. Email scraping is typically done with a tool like a browser add-on extension to find email addresses from a website or social media platform. 

The tool will extract all relevant email addresses from a site, and format the data in an Excel, CSV or text file so it can easily be used by the person scraping. So if you’ve ever been online and wondered how to get someone’s email address from their LinkedIn page, email scraping tools can help you quickly access this data. But they don’t just work on LinkedIn - you can gain insights from any website. 

And, it’s not just email data you can scrape these days. Oftentimes, an email scraping tool will also extract other information like phone numbers and professional title. All of this is done for the purpose of marketing, giving businesses a clear and direct way to reach potential clients. 

So - Is Email Scraping Legal?

So with all this said, there’s no doubting the power behind web scraping. The only question now is…is it legal to scrape a website? The last thing you want to do is land in trouble and risk losing your business - or worse.

Fortunately, the answer is yes - email scraping is legal. At least, when done correctly. You’ll need to consider some of the basic rules ahead of time so you can stay out of legal trouble when email scraping.

Above all, it’s important that you’re only scraping from data that is publicly available on the internet. Plus, you’ll also want to check with the Terms of Use on a specific website when you’re email scraping to see if they have any restrictions against it.

In addition, once you begin sending people emails, you need to provide them with a way to unsubscribe or stop receiving them. With these points in mind, you can be free to do your email scraping as needed. We’ll take a deeper look at how to legally scrape email addresses down below:

How to Legally Scrape Email Addresses & Other Web Data

Now that you know what the circumstances are for legal email scraping, we can continue on and describe how exactly you can scrape emails and other data online - 100% legally, of course! 

First things first - who are you trying to reach, and where will you find them?

Assess Who You’re Trying to Reach & Where

When you begin email scraping, you’ll first need to hammer down exactly who you’re trying to reach, or who your audience is. Essentially, who could potentially be your client?

When you have a better idea of who you want to reach, you can start brainstorming where you can scrape their information. For business executives and high-up decision makers who you already know by name, you can probably find them easily on LinkedIn where you will be able to scrape for their email and other contact information. 

On the other hand, if you simply know the name of a company you’d like to target, you can visit their domain and scrape for email addresses from their site. And as we’ll describe below, a great email scraper tool can even help you discover companies that fit in your parameters, so you don’t necessarily need to have a list of domain names before you get started. 

Find a Valuable Email Scraper Tool

Next, you’ll need to find a good email scraping tool that will legally extract information from the internet, while also providing you with great value and can help you quickly access the data you need to grow your sales.

Some email scraping tools will allow you to first search in their database for both B2B and B2C companies, paring down the results by country, industry, size, or other parameters. Then you can take those website details and upload them into the email extractor. 

Or, they may have a database already compiled where you can search for individuals and find their email addresses without even needing to use the scraper tool. In any case, look for a tool that will provide you with more than just email addresses. These days, there is one tool in particular that outperforms the rest - and we’ll let you in on it later on. The Klean Leads solution helps compile all the data you need to build targeted, efficient email marketing campaigns. More on that later, though…

Use the Email Scraper to Compile Data

Now with a list of domain names, either provided by a database search or through your own research, you’re ready to start scraping for emails. With this list, you can upload it into the email extractor tool of your choice, and let the software do all the work for you. Once the tool has completed its scrape, you will have access to a comprehensive list of email addresses from your desired audience. 

The final step is actually building out your email marketing campaign. You’ll want to use an autoresponder tool that allows you to automate the personalization of your campaigns. And, you’ll want an email tool that you can build detailed, automated follow-up sequences with. Typically, you’d have a separate email scraper and email autoresponder. But with Klean Leads, you get both of these software in one…how nice is that? Not only does it save you money - it makes life easier keeping everything in one software package.

We’ll break down exactly why Klean Leads has come to be known as the #1 choice later on. First - a few instances you need to be aware of in which email scraping is NOT legal.

Instances in Which Email Scraping is Not Legal

We just explained how to legally scrape email addresses. But, it’s important to note that email scraping is not legal in all situations. So, let’s go over some of the instances where you can get in trouble with email scraping. 

Re-Selling

First, we’ll point out that you are not permitted to re-sell someone’s personal information without their permission. For example, if you are able to scrape someone’s email address or other data from a website, and then sell that personal data to another party without the individual’s permission, you could face some serious legal issues. 

Scraping Behind a Log-In

Additionally, if you scrape private data that can only be accessed behind a login, that is also a legal restriction that you don’t want to compromise. So as we mentioned above, stick to scraping leads from websites that are public and can be accessed by anyone, without requiring a log in. 

Want to Automate & Supercharge Your Email Scraping Efforts?

With all these points in mind, it’s clear to see that scraping emails is a great tool that business owners can leverage to boost their outreach efforts and eventually, their sales. There are many email scraping tools out there, but they are not all identical, and don’t come with similar perks. So for a superior alternative to Hunter.io for email scraping or a lead finder alternative to D7, look no further than Klean Leads. 

For any freelancers, agencies, or other businesses, our email scraper software seamlessly helps you extract emails for cold emailing prospects to pitch them your services. Plus, we have a number of other capabilities that no other scraping service offers, and provide you with more contact information than you can find anywhere else.

You can leverage our LinkedIn email extractor if you know they have a profile, or you can conduct a simple email search by name or find emails from a domain. And to supercharge your prospecting even more, you can always use our bulk email finder. With any of these features, you can completely automate your prospecting and outreach efforts in a way no other scraping tool can. So no matter where your clients are at online, we’ll help you reach them.

With less time spent guessing email addresses and hoping you won’t burn your domain, Klean Leads helps you focus on what really matters in moving your business forward–closing deals and making sales.  

Is Email Scraping Legal? Wrapping Things Up

So, now that you’ve learned that email scraping is in fact legal, you can feel confident to leverage this tactic to take your outreach efforts to the next level. Plus, you can scale ahead of competition with a high-quality email scraper like Klean Leads. 

Helping you save both time and money, our software does the work of various tools, all in one. So, you can easily automate your outreach utilizing our wide range of features, helping you effectively reach more potential clients. 

Try Klean Leads today risk-free, and see what these powerful capabilities can do to move the needle forward in your business.