Tools for finding e-mail addresses fall into two groups. The first are programs installed on your computer that visit the websites you choose, walk through their subpages and list the addresses they find – you buy a licence and collect data from any site you like. The second are cloud services that sell access to their own, previously collected database of addresses – you pay a subscription for a number of lookups.

We compared five well-known tools from both groups. E-mail Hunter is our own program, so all information about the others comes exclusively from their vendors’ websites, read on 20 October 2026. Where a vendor does not state something, we say so instead of guessing. Prices and features may change – check the vendor’s current offer before buying.

E-mail Hunter is a Windows 10/11 program that finds company e-mail addresses on websites together with their contact details: phone number, company name, postal address, industry and website. You point it to a website or pick one of more than a hundred business directories from dozens of countries, enter the industry and the city, and the program builds the search address itself and works through the results and the company profiles.

Key features: searching PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OpenDocument and RTF documents linked on pages; reading hidden addresses (written in words such as “office [at] company [dot] com”, character codes, addresses assembled by scripts, Cloudflare protection); pages built with JavaScript opened in the WebView2 browser engine; respecting robots.txt (on by default); up to ten campaigns at once, resumable after an interruption; a “Source” column for every address; export and re-import of TXT, CSV, XML and Excel files. The mailing version adds an HTML message editor with attachments, sending in batches from several mailboxes and checking whether an address exists without sending a message. The program is available in five languages: Polish, English, German, French and Spanish.

Price: PLN 199 gross (address collection and saving results) or PLN 299 gross (plus mailing and verification), paid once; a free demo is available. Limitations: the program does not take website addresses from search engines (it uses business directories instead), supports a single proxy server, does not read addresses saved as images and does not solve CAPTCHAs – for sites that require one, it opens a browser window where you solve it yourself. Address verification needs an open port 25, which many home Internet providers block.

For years GSA GmbH sold a program called GSA Email Spider. At its former address the vendor now presents GSA Scrape Genie, described as “automated B2B lead extraction software”. It runs on Windows (on Mac and Linux via Parallels, Wine or a virtual machine), costs USD 147 for a lifetime licence with free updates and has a free demo. According to the change log, the latest version is 1.09 of 11 October 2026.

Its strengths are collecting website addresses from search engines (the vendor speaks of “thousands of search engines”), filters by country, language and domain, HTTP, SOCKS4 and SOCKS5 proxy support and built-in sending via SMTP from multiple accounts with hourly limits. It collects phone and fax numbers and social profiles; company name and address can be captured after your own configuration. The vendor’s page says nothing about searching PDF documents, respecting robots.txt or interface languages.

ScrapeBox is an extensive SEO toolkit for Windows (10, 11, Windows Server) and macOS in which e-mail scraping is one of many functions. It costs USD 97 once (the vendor quotes a regular price of USD 197), the licence covers one computer and updates are free. There is no trial; a refund within 14 days is available only if the program cannot be made to run with support’s help.

The built-in Email Scraper collects addresses from a list of pages you first gather with the Search Engine Harvester from 30 search engines, or crawls a website to a chosen depth; it supports proxies and multiple threads. The paid Email Scraper Premium plugin (USD 47) adds keyword search, crawling up to 8 levels deep, content filters, Excel output and address checks (domain, DNS, MX record, port 25). Phone, company name and address can only be extracted with a self-configured “Custom Crawler”. ScrapeBox does not send e-mails.

Atomic Email Hunter is a Windows 7–11 program, version 15.22 of 29 November 2025. It costs USD 89.90 per computer, paid once, with updates for one year. In its privacy policy the vendor names AtomPark Software Inc. (USA), while its legal information names ATOMPARK UKRAINA LLC of Kyiv. The trial runs for 7 days, cannot save results and shows 50 addresses.

The program searches for addresses by keywords in search engines (the vendor’s pages give between 42 and 68 engines), crawls chosen websites and URL lists, has Facebook, Twitter and Yelp plugins, filters, proxy, multithreading and an option to skip hidden addresses. It collects the names of address owners but – as the vendor itself states – does not collect phone numbers. Verification and sending are separate programs: Atomic Mail Verifier (USD 69.85) and Atomic Mail Sender (USD 89.90).

Hunter.io, founded in 2015 by Antoine Finkelstein and François Grante, is a cloud service: a web app, extensions for Chrome, Firefox and Edge, a Google Sheets add-on and an API. You do not crawl websites of your choice – you enter a domain, a company name or a person’s name, and Hunter returns addresses from its own database (81 million indexed websites, according to the vendor) together with their sources and discovery dates. Some addresses are “inferred” from the company’s address pattern and labelled as such.

The Free plan gives 50 credits a month; paid plans cost €49, €149 and €299 a month (2,000, 10,000 and 25,000 credits; 30% less with annual billing). One address found costs one credit, a verification half a credit. Hunter also offers sequences sent via Gmail, Outlook or SMTP and CRM integrations (HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, Zoho). The vendor’s pages do not describe collecting phone numbers or postal addresses of companies.

 Yes  Partly  No  Not stated by the vendor  Not applicable

You want to build your own database of companies from a specific industry and city – with phone and address, not just e-mail. Programs that search business directories and company profiles themselves have the edge here. E-mail Hunter has ready-made templates for more than a hundred directories, saves complete company data, and its “Source” column shows where every address came from. You pay once, with no limit on searches.

You collect addresses from thousands of pages found in search engines and run your own proxy servers. GSA Scrape Genie and ScrapeBox are built for this kind of work – both take website addresses from search engines and handle proxy lists. Atomic Email Hunter also searches engines, but it does not collect phone numbers, and verification and sending have to be bought separately.

You are looking for a specific person’s address at a known company. Hunter.io answers immediately from its own database, but you pay for every result through a subscription and you do not choose the pages the data comes from.

A business address such as john.smith@company.com identifies a specific person, so it is personal data under the GDPR. In many countries, including Poland, sending commercial information by e-mail requires the recipient’s prior consent. Before a campaign, check the law of your recipients’ country and the terms of the websites you search. E-mail Hunter helps respect website owners’ wishes: it follows robots.txt by default, can skip deliberately hidden addresses and does not bypass CAPTCHAs – a person solves them.

What is the difference between an e-mail extractor program and a cloud service?
A program searches the websites you choose and runs on your computer with no limit on searches. A cloud service searches the provider’s own database and charges credits within a subscription.

Which of the compared programs has a Polish, German, French or Spanish interface?
Among the compared tools, only the vendor of E-mail Hunter lists its program’s languages: Polish, English, German, French and Spanish. The other vendors do not state the interface languages.

Can I check that an address exists without sending a message?
Yes – E-mail Hunter (mailing version), the Email Scraper Premium plugin for ScrapeBox and Hunter.io ask the mail server about the recipient. In Atomic Email Hunter this is done by a separate program, Atomic Mail Verifier.

Can I try E-mail Hunter for free?
Yes. Download the free E-mail Hunter demo or read the full program description.

Sources (vendors’ websites, read on 20 Oct 2026): GSA Scrape Genie, GSA Email Spider (manual), ScrapeBox Email Scraper, ScrapeBox Email Scraper Premium, Atomic Email Hunter, Atomic Email Hunter – features, Hunter.io – pricing, Hunter.io – our data.