On LetsExtract.com, it is claimed that LetsExtract Email Studio is “the best email crawler you can find on the market.” Lately, I’ve been testing a lot of desktop-based email-finding software (see my Atomic Email Hunter Review, my Email Extractor Pro review, my Cute Web Email Extractor review and my Email Grabber review), and feel like I have definitely tested enough of these tools to be able to make a firm judgment on that claim. In this review, I’ll try LetsExtract Email Studio and judge for myself whether it is actually the best email crawler out there. Let’s get started.
Installing LetsExtract Email Studio
Go to LetsExtract.com and click the Download Now button. There is a standard install process, though there’s a lot of disk space that’s required:
Using LetsExtract Email Studio
When you open LetsExtract Email Studio for the first time, you’ll be presented with these options:
All the features of other email-finding tools are there (though I only ever care about finding emails by searching a website), along with some additional features such as extracting emails from the Yellow Pages, Facebook, Twitter and Google Maps. For finding emails from places like Facebook and Twitter, it’s done manually — there’s a small browser window and when you’re on any given page (such as a profile page of someone), you can click the Extract button to pull any emails on the page.
Here I’ll just go through the following 2 features for pulling emails, as I feel they’re the main one’s (finding emails from Whois data is largely useless, while I still don’t understand what the use-case is for pulling emails from files on your computer or from a mailbox):
- Finding emails by searching some keyword(s) on a search engine, and crawling the websites returned
- Finding emails by scanning websites
Finding emails by searching some keyword(s) on a search engine, and crawling the websites returned
LetsExtract Email Studio uses AOL (I didn’t even know that still existed), ASK (another obscure search engine), Google and Yahoo! to search for websites for a given keyword, which it can then crawl for emails. As with my tests of other email-finding software, I gave it the keyword “yoga” and asked it to do a search for this keyword and search returning websites for emails. Here are some of the emails pulled after just a couple of minutes (click to enlarge):
As with other tools, LetsExtract Email Studio does a search for the keyword and has the maximum number of results (100) returned from each search engine, e.g. if you give it the keyword “yoga” it will find websites to scrape from these URL’s:
Finding emails by scanning websites
You can give LetsExtract Email Studio just one website to scan for emails, or if you want to check multiple websites, click the “Switch to Bulk Mode” to enter a list:
Here’s what it looks like if I just give it one website (outwittrade.com) to scan for emails, if I let it look at all the pages it can find:
Though unfortunately, LetsExtract Email Studio couldn’t find the email [email protected] on outwittrade.com, since it’s obfuscated by Cloudflare (only Atomic Email Hunter was able to do that). Here are the very unsatisfactory results it came back with instead:
What’s good about LetsExtract Email Studio
First, LetsExtract Email has a fantastic list of features, giving you a lot of control over how you find emails (it rivals Cute Web Email Extractor in this regard). If you go to Settings -> Program settings, you can adjust things like the maximum number of emails to return for each website, pages to prioritize looking at, URL and email filters, and more:
It’s also easy to use the software, it runs smoothly, and I didn’t encounter any major problems using it.
Beyond a great list of features, one thing LetsExtract Email Studio does that no other email-finding tool I tested is guessing the full name of an email address owner in some cases. Here are a couple of examples:
I have no idea how this works, but it’s a huge plus having this information (I manually checked these and the names here are correct in this case). However, this feature isn’t perfect, as it’ll also often guess rubbish as well:
What’s bad about LetsExtract Email Studio
LetsExtract Email Studio can’t find a lot of emails with the default settings. Here’s an example of a simple test I gave it, containing both a Cloudflare-obfuscated email and a couple of emails written to evade scrapers (like “john (dot) smith (at) outwittrade (dot) press”):
There also seemed to be a minor bug for me where if I wanted the software to bring back only one email per domain, if I entered “1” in the settings here…
… It would never return any email. Rather, to get it to return one email per domain, I would have to enter “2” here instead. A minor issue only.
LetsExtract Email Studio: the bottom line
LetsExtract Email Studio has a great list of features, as good as any other email-finder. However, it’s not “the best email crawler you can find on the market,” since it stills falls short at finding many emails. Still, it’s a good tool overall, and well worth considering — especially because its basic version only costs $39, roughly half the cost of its main competitor Atomic Email Hunter.
