How to Use the LinkedIn Connections to Emails

*For a workflow targeting 10–20 LinkedIn connections, the full process typically takes around 5–10 minutes total, including exporting connection data and enriching profiles with email discovery, plus a few extra seconds for the workflow to process.

Before you start

• Awareness of LinkedIn’s safety limits:
  • We recommend extracting up to 40 connections/day with a Basic account.
  • With Sales Navigator, you can go up to 75/day.
  • If you enable email discovery, cut these numbers in half, since the Workflow performs extra lookups per profile.

Step 1: Connect your LinkedIn account

To let the Workflow act on your behalf:

1. Install the PhantomBuster browser extension and connect your LinkedIn session in one click.
2. If you’re not using Chrome or Firefox, you can retrieve your session cookie manually (see our cookie guide).

Check your browser user agent
Make sure your browser is up to date before connecting your account. 
→ If your Chrome or Firefox version is outdated, your session cookie may expire much more quickly, and you’ll need to reconnect often.

Step 2: Choose how to sort and extract your connections

Decide the order in which the Workflow processes your LinkedIn connections:

• Recently added → Best for continually extracting new connections. Combine with repeated launches to capture only new additions each time.
• First name → Processes connections in alphabetical order by first name.
• Last name → Processes connections in alphabetical order by last name.

Then, set your daily extraction volume:

• Number of profiles to scrape per day (optional)
  • Default = 40 per day.
  • Maximum = 40/day with Basic, 75/day with Sales Navigator.
  • Entering higher numbers may cause LinkedIn to log you out and require frequent session refreshes.

This Workflow runs once per day automatically:
- You can’t change or schedule the launch frequency.
- Each daily run will process your connections according to the limits you set.

Step 3: Enrich your leads with professional emails (optional)

The Workflow can return two types of emails:

• Profile email → if the LinkedIn user has made their email visible on their profile, the automation will extract it. This is usually a personal email address.
• Discovered email → if no email is available on the profile, you can enable an Email discovery service to look for a verified professional email address instead.

How it works:

• In your results file, you’ll see one column for the email found on the profile and another for the email found by the discovery service.
• Either column may be empty if no email was found for that contact.

Discovery options:

1. Click on the “Select your email discovery service” dropdown.
2. Choose one of the following options:
   • PhantomBuster credits (default option)
     • Each plan includes monthly email discovery credits.
     • 1 credit = 1 attempt to find and verify an email for one profile.
     • Credits reset monthly.
   • Third-party services
     • If you’re not getting many discovered emails, connect your own account by entering your API key for:
       • Dropcontact.io
       • Hunter.io
       • Snov.io

Enabling email discovery means the automation will spend more time on each profile, since it needs to process both the message and the email lookup. This increases execution time per launch.

Tip for safe use
When using email discovery, process about half of the default daily recommendation for your automation. This reduces the risk of hitting LinkedIn’s rate limits.

Step 4 (Optional): Advanced settings

Advanced settings are available if you want to fine-tune how your Workflow runs, but by default they’re already optimized for most use cases.

We recommend leaving them as they are unless a guide specifically instructs you to change something.

→ For a detailed overview of all advanced options (like execution limits, retries, email notifications, proxies, webhooks, and file management), see our Advanced settings guide.

Launch and results

When you’re ready:

• Toggle the ON/OFF switch to start your Workflow.

Once it finishes:

• Open the Results tab in the Workflow console to see the data collected.
• Download your results as a CSV or JSON file, or view them as a dynamic list on the LinkedIn Leads page.

→ To learn how to export your data to Google Sheets, integrate with other tools, or reuse it in more automations, check our Access and Export your Phantom Results guide.

Export and input limits on the Free plan
If you’re on the Free plan or Free trial, some features are limited:
- CSV exports include only the first 10 rows of results.
- CSV download links (for dynamic viewing in Google Sheets or integrations) are not available.
- JSON exports are not available.
- CSV upload as an input method is not supported.
To unlock all features, you’ll need to upgrade to a paid plan.

What you give (Input) and What you get (Output)

This section gives you a detailed breakdown of everything you need to provide to run this Workflow, and everything you’ll receive once it completes.

What you give (Input)

What you get (Output)

Tips and troubleshooting

Common pitfalls

• Browser not updated → outdated user agents cause cookies to expire quickly.
• Setting extraction limits too high → more than 40/day Basic or 75/day Sales Navigator.
• Expecting 100% email match rates → discovery depends on available data.
• Expecting all data right away → this Workflow launches once per day and retrieves new connections. If you also need to enrich those profiles, the LinkedIn Profile Scraper runs more frequently.
• No custom scheduling → This Workflow doesn’t have Launch settings, it runs once per day automatically.
• If the Workflow stops working:
  • Errors may not always appear in the Dashboard.
  • To check hidden errors and execution details, open the Logs section from the console page of your Workflow. For step-by-step instructions, see How to Troubleshoot Errors in Workflows.

If you run into issues

• Browse the Fix Issues & Troubleshoot Errors section for solutions to common problems.
• Review our Automation Rate Limits by Platform guide.
• Check our Best Practices for Social Media Automation guide.

Suggested automations

Once you’ve extracted connections with emails, you can:

• CRM & Integrations → push leads directly into your CRM or email automation tool.
• AI LinkedIn Message Writer → generate personalized outreach for your verified leads.
• LinkedIn Auto Connect → continue growing your network while maintaining a clean lead pipeline.