Your own lead database is a list of companies from a chosen industry and region – with e-mail address, phone number, name and postal address – that you use for sales and marketing. Lists bought from brokers age quickly, and you usually cannot check where the data came from. You can build such a list yourself from public company websites and business directories, and then send a message to the addresses you choose.
Below we walk through the whole process in
E-mail Hunter using one example:
accountants in Manchester. The screenshots come from the English version of the program; the company data on the list is fictitious (.example domains).
What you need
A computer with Windows 10 or 11 and E-mail Hunter. The edition without sending collects addresses, saves the results and exports them to files; the edition with e-mail sending adds address verification, the message editor and sending. Both licences are a one-time payment. You can try the search in the
free demo. For sending you also need a mail account with SMTP access – the same kind you use in your e-mail client.
Step 1. Choose the source: business directory, trade and city
Most contacts to companies in one industry are found in business directories – every company has a listing there with e-mail, phone and address. In the search window click Business directory. First you choose the country (the program knows more than a hundred directories from dozens of countries and suggests the country that matches the program language), then the service, the trade and the city. The program builds exactly the same search address that the service itself would build.
The “Business directory” window: the trade “accountant” and the city of Manchester give a ready-made search address on yell.com.
The address pattern is visible and can be edited, and the “(own pattern)” entry lets you describe any other directory: mark the place for the trade with {fraza} and the city with {miasto}. An empty city means a nationwide search. The option Narrow the search to the results for this trade and city sets the filters so that the program only visits result pages and the company listings they link to – it does not collect addresses from other cities or other trades.
If a service asks for an “I am not a robot” confirmation, the window says so in a box below the address. You then enable the browser window option in the search window and solve the task yourself – the program does not solve CAPTCHAs.
Step 2. Set the scope and pace of the search
The “Use” button passes the address and filters to the search window, where you see them together with all other settings and can still change them.
The search window after applying the template: the directory address, trade and city in the URL filters, subpages with depth 1.
The search iterations are the maximum number of pages the program visits, and the threads are how many pages it downloads at the same time. If a site is sensitive to load, use one thread and a delay of 5–7 seconds. The option Respect the site's robots.txt is on by default: the program skips pages the site forbids to robots and keeps the delay between downloads requested by the site (up to 60 seconds).
The other options decide how many addresses the program can read:
• Load pages built with JavaScript – a page that gave nothing is opened in the WebView2 browser engine and read again.
• Search documents (PDF, Word, Excel) – the program also reads linked PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OpenDocument and RTF files. They are read in memory only; nothing is saved to disk.
• Hidden addresses – the program reads addresses written out in words (office [at] company [dot] com), as character codes, assembled by scripts or protected by Cloudflare. The option “Skip hidden addresses” collects only addresses written in plain form.
• Remember the search state – a long search can be resumed after an interruption, even after a computer failure.
Want to search several directories or a list of company websites? Add another URL creates a list of searches run one after another, Load from file reads addresses from a text file (one per line), and the Campaign window runs up to ten searches at once, each in its own tab.
Step 3. Collect full company data, not just the e-mail
In the program settings tick Search also phone numbers and address data of companies. For every e-mail address the program then tries to find the phone number, company name, postal address (street, number, postcode and city), industry and website. It also reads the descriptions the site author prepared for search engines (schema.org, microdata, contact data in the page script) – so the data is often complete even when the screen shows only the company name and a button.
Result list: e-mail, phone, company name, the page where the address was found, the address source and the verification result. The company data is fictitious.
Results appear on the list as they are found. The Source column tells you where each address came from: HTML (written in plain form), SCHEMA, JSON and MICRODATA (from the company description prepared by the site author), WORDS (written in words), CLOUDFLARE, CODE, JS, TAGS, DOC (from a document) or RENDER (from a page loaded in the browser engine). SCHEMA, JSON and MICRODATA entries usually have the most complete company data. The Search log shows what the program did with every page it visited – including pages where the site refused access or robots.txt forbade the page.
Step 4. Clean the database and save it to a file
While collecting, the program already discards strings that only look like an e-mail address: file names such as logo@2x.png, examples from website templates (john@example.com) and addresses with an invalid structure. The same address found on several pages creates one row. The rest of the clean-up is up to you:
• the “E-mail containing the text” and “E-mail does not contain the text” filters and the list of address endings keep only the addresses you are interested in;
• the Skipped domains list keeps the program away from social networks, maps and search engines;
• Merge duplicates joins rows with the same address, and sorting by domain shows companies with several addresses.
In the edition with sending, Verify addresses checks whether an address exists without sending a message: the program asks the domain's mail server about the recipient and disconnects before any message is created. The result goes to the “Verification” column: Exists, Does not exist, Server accepts everything, Domain without mail, No connection, Server refused or Malformed address. Verification needs an open port 25, which many home internet providers block – the program then says so plainly instead of guessing. Remove unverified e-mails deletes addresses whose verification did not confirm them; addresses not checked yet stay on the list.
Save the finished database from the Export menu to a TXT, CSV, XML or Excel (XLSX) file – together with phone numbers, addresses, industry and the source column. A CSV or XLSX file can be imported into a spreadsheet or CRM system. The program reads the same files back, so you can build one database from many searches: repeated addresses are merged into one row and empty fields are filled from the file.
Step 5. Send a message to the collected companies
This part is available in the edition with e-mail sending. First add an account in the Mailbox menu: SMTP server and port (usually 587 with SSL enabled, or 465), user name and password, sender address and name, and optionally a reply-to address. The password is stored encrypted or entered at every sending, and the “Check” button sends a test message to the account's own address.
The “Account” window: SMTP server, port 587 with SSL enabled, user and sender address. The “Check” button sends a test message. The account data is fictitious.
You write the message in an HTML editor – with fonts, colours, lists, tables, links and images embedded in the content, which the recipient sees without downloading anything – or as plain text in UTF-8. You can add attachments and save the finished message in the E-mail messages library to reuse it later. The editor underlines spelling mistakes in the program language, and text pasted from Word or a web page arrives as clean text.
The Send a message command sends to all addresses on the list or only to the checked ones. You spread the sending over time: you set how many messages go in one batch and how many minutes to wait between batches.
Sending spread over time: 40 messages per batch and a 30-minute pause between batches.
You can choose several accounts at once – messages then go out alternately from the selected mailboxes, which reduces the load on a single account. Before the first message the program logs in to every selected mailbox, so a wrong password stops the sending before any message leaves. Addresses on the blacklist are always skipped. The sending window shows how many messages were sent, remain, failed or were skipped, and the report can be saved to a TXT or XML file with the result and the sending mailbox for every address.
Good practice and the law
A business address such as john.smith@company.com identifies a specific person, so it is personal data under the GDPR. In the European Union, commercial e-mail is governed by national laws implementing Directive 2002/58/EC – in many countries the first commercial message requires the recipient's prior consent, and the rules for business addresses differ between countries; in the United Kingdom PECR applies. Before a campaign, check the law of your recipients' country and the terms of the websites you search.
In practice: write to addresses for which you have a legal basis; tell recipients in the footer how to opt out and add those who do to the blacklist; start with small batches and pauses; verify addresses before sending – many bounces lower mail servers' trust in your account. The program helps you respect the wishes of site owners: it follows robots.txt by default, can skip deliberately hidden addresses and does not bypass CAPTCHAs.
Frequently asked questions
Where does E-mail Hunter get its data?
Only from public websites you point it to and from business directories. The program has no address database of its own for sale – you build every database yourself and know where each address came from.
How many addresses will I find?
This cannot be promised in advance – it depends on how many companies on a given site publish an e-mail address. The search log shows the state of every page visited, so you can see whether a page had no address or the site refused access.
Can I move the database to a spreadsheet or CRM?
Yes – CSV and Excel (XLSX) exports contain column headers, and before saving a CSV file you choose the separator (tab, semicolon, comma or your own).
Which languages does the program support?
English, Polish, German, French and Spanish. You change the language in the “Language” menu instantly, without restarting.
