What the extractor finds (and what it misses)
The tool uses a regex tuned to match the vast majority of real-world email addresses while avoiding obvious false positives. It catches standard name@domain.tld, plus-addressed name+tag@domain.tld, dotted local parts first.last@domain.tld, and addresses inside angle brackets like "Display Name" <name@domain.tld>.
What it intentionally doesn't try to do: validate that the address is deliverable, that the domain has MX records, that the local part complies with every RFC 5322 corner case (quoted local parts with spaces are legal but extremely rare and almost never used in the wild). For pattern extraction from a document, this is the right tradeoff. For validation before sending mail, use a real email validation service.
Useful operations
- Deduplicate — the same address may appear many times in a log or document. Dedup turns 1,000 lines with 50 unique addresses into 50.
- Sort alphabetically — useful for diffing two extractions, finding the address you're looking for, or producing a clean reference list.
- Lowercase — most mail systems treat email addresses case-insensitively.
Alice@Example.comandalice@example.comreach the same person. Normalizing to lowercase makes dedup catch these as the same. - Strip plus-addressing —
alice+marketing@example.comandalice+work@example.comdeliver to the same Gmail inbox. Strip the plus-tag if you want to count unique recipients rather than unique addresses-as-written. - Group by domain — quickly see "all the @gmail.com addresses, all the @company.com addresses". Useful for analyzing customer lists.
Privacy reminder
Email addresses are personal data under GDPR, CCPA, and most other privacy regimes. Extracting them from a document doesn't give you the right to email those people — that needs a separate lawful basis (consent, legitimate interest, existing relationship). Mass cold emails to extracted addresses violate marketing regulations in most jurisdictions and damage your sender reputation.
Legitimate uses: extracting from your own logs, your own outbound documents, lists you already have permission to contact. Everything runs in your browser — the input text never leaves your machine.
Common use cases
- Extract contacts from a forwarded email's header soup
- Pull all email addresses from a server log
- Convert a CC list copy-paste back into clean per-line format
- Audit a document for accidentally-included email addresses (data leakage)
Frequently asked questions
Does this validate the emails?
It validates them syntactically (matches a regex tuned for real-world addresses). It does NOT check deliverability — no MX lookup, no SMTP probe, no list-disposable detection. For pre-send validation, use a dedicated service.
What's "strip plus-addressing"?
Gmail and many providers let you add <code>+anything</code> after your username, so <code>alice+work@example.com</code> and <code>alice+personal@example.com</code> both reach the same inbox. Stripping the plus-tag normalizes these to <code>alice@example.com</code> — useful for counting unique people rather than unique addresses-as-written.
Why are my emails not in the list when I copy from a Word doc?
Word and many word processors convert <code>name@example.com</code> to a hyperlink with display text and a separate <code>mailto:</code> link. The regex finds both, but pasting may strip the hyperlinks. Try "Paste as plain text" (Ctrl+Shift+V) or copy from the document's raw text.
Is this OK to use legally?
Extracting emails from your own documents, logs, or content you have permission to access is fine. Mass-extracting from someone else's database, scraping a site you don't own, or sending unsolicited bulk mail to extracted addresses violates GDPR/CCPA/CAN-SPAM in most jurisdictions. Extraction is a tool — the legal question is what you do next.