Why your LinkedIn export has almost no email addresses
You requested the export, you opened the file, and the Email Address column is empty on almost every row. Nothing has gone wrong. This is the expected result, and it is worth understanding why before you go looking for a tool that promises otherwise.
In short
- The column is blank because each connection controls it, not you. There is no export setting to change.
- On one real 1,601-connection export, **31 rows had an email address. That is 1.9 percent.**
- Nothing legitimate will fill the gap. Services that offer to are selling data collected somewhere else.
- The profile URL is the reliable identifier, and LinkedIn itself is the reliable channel.
The short answer
LinkedIn includes a connection's email address in your export only if that person has chosen to share it with their connections. It is a setting on their account, not yours, and the default is off.
So the blanks are not missing data. They are the large majority of people who never went looking for that setting, which is almost everybody. There is nothing to fix, no export option you missed, and no way to request it again and get more.
What the real number looks like
We measured a real export while building this site. A 1,601-connection network, exported in 2026:
- 31 rows had an email address. That is 1.9 percent.
- 20 rows had no employer listed, and 17 had no job title. Both around 1 percent.
- 1,411 distinct employers across 1,601 people, so the network was unusually spread out rather than clustered at a few companies.
This is a single real network rather than a survey, so treat 1.9 percent as an illustration of the order of magnitude rather than a benchmark. Everything we have seen sits in low single digits. If yours is dramatically higher, you likely have a lot of connections from a company or community where sharing was the norm.
What you cannot do about it
Re-requesting the archive gives you the same file. Requesting the full archive rather than Connections only gives you more files about you, not more about them. There is no paid LinkedIn tier that changes this: Sales Navigator surfaces more profile information inside LinkedIn but does not add email addresses to your export.
About services that offer to fill the gap
Plenty of tools will take your export and return it with email addresses attached. They are not recovering something LinkedIn withheld from you. They are matching your rows against a database assembled elsewhere, and the question worth asking is where that database came from.
Some of it is legitimately sourced. Some of it is scraped. In 2025 LinkedIn sued Proxycurl, the best known company operating at that scale, and it shut down that July. If you are in the UK or EU there is a second question: appending contact details to a person's record and then emailing them is processing personal data, and you are the one who has to have a lawful basis for it.
What to use instead
The URL column is populated for essentially every row and is stable. It is a far better key than a name, which collides constantly, or an employer, which goes stale.
You are a first-degree connection, so you can message them directly without an InMail credit. For someone who already knows you, that is also the channel where the shared context is visible on screen.
For the handful of people genuinely worth the effort, the company website, a conference bio or a mutual introduction will get you there. Doing this for ten people is an afternoon. Doing it for 300 is why the append services exist.
The simplest route, routinely forgotten. If a conversation is already going, ask for the best address.
Email addresses are only useful once you know who is worth writing to. The export has what you need for that decision: job title, employer, and how long ago you connected. Work out the who first, and the how becomes a problem worth solving for ten people rather than a thousand.
Common questions
Can I change a setting to get more email addresses?
No. The setting belongs to each of your connections, not to you, and its default is off. Nothing on your account affects what appears in that column.
Does Sales Navigator include email addresses in exports?
No. Sales Navigator gives you better search and more visibility inside LinkedIn, but it does not add contact details to your connections export.
Why does my export have a few addresses but not many?
Those are the people who deliberately turned sharing on. It tends to be a small and slightly self-selecting group: recruiters, founders, and people who have been actively networking.
Is it legal to use the addresses that are there?
Those people chose to share them with their connections, which is a reasonable basis for a genuine one-to-one message. Adding them to a bulk marketing list is a different activity with different rules, and in the UK and EU it is the one that gets people into trouble.
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