Guides
Working with extracted email addresses
Pulling addresses out of a document is the easy part. These guides cover what happens either side of it: where the addresses actually hide in each kind of source, how to turn a raw pile of matches into a list that will not damage your sending reputation, what the email address format genuinely permits, and the rules that apply once you start sending.
Everything here is written from working with real, messy contact data — CRM exports with three addresses in one cell, conference PDFs, mail logs with a hundred thousand repeated lines — rather than from the specification alone. Where a guide takes a position, it says what the trade-off is instead of presenting one option as the only one.
- Extraction9 min read
How to extract email addresses from any text, file or export
A practical walkthrough of pulling addresses out of spreadsheets, PDFs, JSON payloads, HTML source, email headers and server logs — including the formats that quietly lose contacts.
Read the guide - Deliverability11 min read
How to clean an email list before your first campaign
The order to run deduplication, role-account removal, domain filtering and verification in — and the bounce and complaint thresholds that decide whether your domain survives the first send.
Read the guide - Fundamentals10 min read
What actually counts as a valid email address
Plus addressing, subdomains, internationalised names, new gTLDs and the quoted local parts almost every regex gets wrong — and why syntax validity says nothing about deliverability.
Read the guide - Compliance12 min read
Using extracted email addresses lawfully: GDPR, CAN-SPAM and CASL
What changes when an address was collected from a public page rather than given to you: lawful basis, the disclosures every message needs, opt-out handling and what to record.
Read the guide - Deliverability13 min read
Why your emails land in spam, and how to get them out
SPF, DKIM and DMARC explained as the three questions a receiving server actually asks — plus the reputation signals, content triggers and volume patterns that decide the inbox.
Read the guide - Data handling11 min read
Why your CSV export breaks in Excel, and how to stop it
Mangled accents, vanished leading zeros, addresses turned into dates, everything crammed into column A, and the formula-injection risk almost nobody checks for.
Read the guide - Deliverability12 min read
What email verification results actually mean
Valid, invalid, catch-all, unknown, risky, disposable — what each verdict is really telling you, how the check works underneath, and which ones are safe to send to.
Read the guide - Prospecting14 min read
Building a B2B prospect list from scratch
The full workflow from an empty spreadsheet to a segmented, verified, ready-to-send list — where to source companies, how to find the right people, and what to record.
Read the guide - Technical13 min read
Regular expressions for extracting email addresses
Why the popular patterns fail on real text, how boundary detection actually decides your results, and a worked pattern with the trade-offs stated rather than hidden.
Read the guide
Who these are written for
Anyone who ends up holding raw contact data and has to make something usable out of it. In practice that means three groups, and the guides address all of them.
Sales and SDR teams turning conference rosters, directory pages and forwarded threads into prospect lists — where the questions are which addresses to keep, which will bounce, and how to import them without a manual cleanup pass.
Recruiters pulling candidate contacts out of applicant exports and long email chains — where deduplication is the difference between one message and three, and where the personal address is usually the correct one to use rather than the one to filter out.
Marketing and operations cleaning a list before it reaches a sending platform — where role-account removal and suppression-list subtraction directly protect sender reputation, and where the numbers in the deliverability guide are the ones that decide whether a campaign lands.
None of the guides assume a technical background. Where a specification detail matters — what the email format actually permits, what a mail server does with a plus tag — it is explained in terms of what it changes about your list, not in terms of the RFC.
The tool these guides refer to
The extractor is free, needs no account, and runs entirely in your browser — the text you paste is never uploaded. It removes duplicates, filters consumer and role addresses, and exports a clean list as TXT, CSV or XLSX.
Open the email extractor