Extract Emails API: The Complete Guide

Need to extract email addresses from text? This guide covers everything you need to know about email extraction via API, including validation, deduplication, and handling edge cases.

What is Email Extraction?

Email extraction identifies and extracts all email addresses from unstructured text. This is useful for lead generation, data processing, and contact management. A robust extractor handles various email formats while filtering invalid addresses.

Example: "Contact us at support@example.com or sales@example.com" extracts ["support@example.com", "sales@example.com"]

Email Format Considerations

Valid email addresses can have various formats:

• Standard: user@domain.com
• Subdomains: user@mail.domain.com
• Plus addressing: user+tag@domain.com
• Dots in local part: first.last@domain.com

Using the Extract Emails API

TinyFn provides a simple endpoint to extract emails:

POST https://api.tinyfn.io/v1/text/extract-emails
Headers: X-API-Key: your-api-key
Content-Type: application/json

{
  "text": "Contact john@example.com or jane@example.org for more info.",
  "unique_only": true
}

{
  "emails": [
    "john@example.com",
    "jane@example.org"
  ],
  "count": 2,
  "domains": ["example.com", "example.org"]
}

Parameters

Code Examples

JavaScript / Node.js

const response = await fetch(
  'https://api.tinyfn.io/v1/text/extract-emails',
  {
    method: 'POST',
    headers: {
      'X-API-Key': 'your-api-key',
      'Content-Type': 'application/json'
    },
    body: JSON.stringify({
      text: 'Contact john@example.com or jane@example.org',
      unique_only: true
    })
  }
);
const result = await response.json();
console.log(result.emails); // ["john@example.com", "jane@example.org"]

Python

import requests

response = requests.post(
    'https://api.tinyfn.io/v1/text/extract-emails',
    headers={'X-API-Key': 'your-api-key'},
    json={'text': 'Contact john@example.com or jane@example.org'}
)
result = response.json()
print(result['emails'])  # ["john@example.com", "jane@example.org"]

cURL

curl -X POST "https://api.tinyfn.io/v1/text/extract-emails" \
  -H "X-API-Key: your-api-key" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"text": "Contact john@example.com or jane@example.org"}'

Common Use Cases

• Lead Generation: Extract contacts from web pages
• Data Migration: Parse emails from legacy documents
• Email List Building: Compile mailing lists from various sources
• Contact Import: Extract emails from business cards or PDFs
• Compliance: Identify emails in documents for GDPR compliance

Best Practices

1. Deduplicate results: Remove duplicate emails for clean lists
2. Validate format: Ensure extracted addresses are valid
3. Respect privacy: Follow data protection regulations
4. Handle edge cases: Consider obfuscated emails (e.g., "user at domain dot com")

Use via MCP

Your AI agent can call this tool directly via Model Context Protocol — no HTTP code needed. Add TinyFn to Claude Desktop, Cursor, or any MCP client:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "tinyfn-text": {
      "url": "https://api.tinyfn.io/mcp/text/",
      "headers": {
        "X-API-Key": "your-api-key"
      }
    }
  }
}

See all text analysis tools available via MCP in our Text Analysis MCP Tools for AI Agents guide.