Email Extractor Pro (found at emailextractorpro.com) is a desktop-based email finding tool, not to be confused with “Cute Web Email Extractor” or “Advanced Email Extractor Pro” from Ahmad Software (found at ahmadsoftware.com). This review is specifically for the tool found at emailextractorpro.com. Here I’ll be testing the tool on several different sites, comparing it with other email finding tools I’ve tested, and sharing my honest thoughts.
Installing Email Extractor Pro
Email Extractor Pro has a simple install process:
After you download the .exe installer (about 26MB at the time of writing) and run it, you should have the software installed within a couple of minutes. You can see that at the time of this review, I’m testing version 6 (“Email Extractor 6”).
Using Email Extractor Pro
Open the software for the first time and you’ll see the start wizard, which looks like this:
Immediately you’ll see that Email Extractor Pro has an additional feature over many other email finders, which is that it can also extract phone numbers and Skype accounts. I don’t have a use for this myself, but it may be handy for you. There are a few different options when it comes to finding email addresses, such as by search engines, searching on web sites (this is the only option of interest to me), searching email accounts (give it an email account of yours and it’ll find emails that it’s interacted with), searching in files and folders, or using WhoIs to find emails.
In this review I’ll test the following email-finding features of this software:
- Finding emails by searching websites or URL’s
- Finding emails by keywords via search engines
- Finding emails by searching WhoIs
I will not test the “Search Email Accounts” and “Search in Files and Folders” features, as these just search either your own email account or a folder on your own computer, rather than going out and searching the internet for emails.
1) Using Email Extractor Pro to find emails from a list of websites or URL’s
Let’s say you have a list of websites, and you want to find emails listed on them. You can either go to the “Website” tab or the “Url List” tab:
If you go to the “Website” tab, it’ll try to find all the internal pages on the given website (you can choose how deep the software scans a website with the “Scan depth” in the top right), but in the “Url List” tab it will ONLY search the URL’s you give it without going any deeper on any website.
2) Using Email Extractor Pro to find emails from Whois information
This may have been useful several years ago, but these days most websites have whois privacy or at least don’t have their main contact email in their whois information, so this wasn’t useful at all in my testing:
3) Using Email Extractor Pro to find emails by keywords via search engines
Enter a keyword, and Email Extractor Pro will search that keyword in search engines like Google, and crawl the websites that come back for emails:
What’s good about Email Extractor Pro?
Email Extractor Pro ran much smoother than Atomic Email Hunter for me (see my Atomic Email Hunter review), it would return emails within seconds of starting any search, it’s easy to use and the GUI is very nice and clean. It’s a very well made piece of software.
What’s bad about Email Extractor Pro?
There are 3 big problems with Email Extractor Pro:
- It misses some emails
- It lacks a lot of features
- There’s no option to return only 1 email per website
I’ll explain each of these below.
Emails missed by Email Extractor Pro
Email Extractor Pro can’t parse javascript (so it won’t find emails that only show when you have javascript enabled), nor will it pick up emails obfuscated by Cloudflare, which is possible if the software is smart (for the below, while it’s unreadable for humans, software should be able to recognize that this is a Cloudflare obfuscated email, and decrypt it through a simple algorithm):
It also won’t check a website’s Facebook about page for an email listed if one can’t be found on the website (Facebook about pages are a goldmine for email addresses).
While Email Extractor Pro misses some harder emails, it can pick up some slightly-obfuscated emails. For finding emails such as john (dot) smith (at) outwittrade (dot) com, for example, Email Extractor Pro can find them, but you have to enable the filters in the settings menu (not enabled by default for some reason):
You can also adjust the regular expression used to identify emails:
This is definitely beyond the ability of most users, though.
Lack of features
Comparing Email Extractor Pro to Atomic Email Hunter, Atomic Email Hunter gives you vastly more options when it comes to finding emails. Here’s a screenshot of the advanced settings in Atomic Email Hunter:
These are very valuable features that are unavailable in Email Extractor Pro. So not only does Email Extractor Pro fail at finding a lot of emails, but it also lacks features allowing you to do much smarter searches.
Email Extractor Pro has no option to return only 1 email per website
If you’re finding emails to reach out to website owners, Email Extractor Pro can only return ALL the emails it finds for a given website or URL, rather than picking the best email for a given website or URL (other tools like hunter.io and snov.io have this same problem — see my hunter.io review and snov.io review). I confirmed this by asking support:
For our purposes, we have no interest in picking up every single email found, rather we just want to find the email address of a website owner and disregard everything else. So Email Extractor Pro is no good for targeted outreach to website owners.
The bottom line on Email Extractor Pro
Email Extractor Pro is a good email-finding tool that ran super-smooth for me, and it’s worth using if you want a nice and simple piece of software for finding emails. But it can’t compete with the range of features of Atomic Email Hunter.
