🧩 I Built a Privacy-First Chrome Extension to Collect Public Emails from LinkedIn

While job hunting and doing outreach, I kept running into the same problem:

A lot of LinkedIn posts and profiles already have email addresses in plain sight, but finding them is slow and repetitive. You scroll, click “see more”, copy one email, scroll again… repeat.

I tried a few tools that claimed to solve this, but most of them had at least one of these issues:

• They sent data to external servers
• Required accounts or logins
• Over-automated things in a way that felt risky
• Or clearly wouldn’t pass Chrome Web Store review

So I decided to build a small tool myself.

That’s how ReachIn was born.

👉 Repo: https://github.com/yagnesh97/reach-in

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What ReachIn Is (and What It Isn’t)

ReachIn is a Chrome extension that helps collect publicly visible email addresses from LinkedIn search result pages.

What it does

• Works only when you explicitly click a button
• Scrolls through LinkedIn search results
• Expands visible content
• Extracts email addresses already shown on the page
• Stores everything locally in your browser
• Lets you copy results or view past collections

What it does not do

• No background scraping
• No credential access
• No analytics or tracking
• No servers
• No remote APIs
• No automation running on its own

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Privacy From Day One

Chrome reviewers care far more about intent and data handling than fancy features.

So I set a few non-negotiable rules early:

1. Everything runs locally
2. No network requests
3. User action triggers everything
4. The behavior must be easy to explain in plain English

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Under the Hood (High Level)

ReachIn is a plain Manifest V3 Chrome extension. No frameworks, no build step.

Structure looks like this:

├── assets/
│   ├── css/
│   │   └── popup.css
│   ├── js/
│   │   ├── background.js
│   │   ├── content.js
│   │   └── popup.js
│   ├── icons/
│   │   ├── icon-16.png
│   │   ├── icon-32.png
│   │   ├── icon-48.png
│   │   └── icon-128.png
│
├── popup.html
├── manifest.json
│
├── README.md
├── PRIVACY.md
├── LICENSE
└── .gitignore

The flow is simple:

• The popup controls everything
• The content script runs only on linkedin.com
• Scripts are injected only after user action
• Data is stored with chrome.storage.local

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Content Script

The content script does three things:

1. Scrolls the page
2. Clicks “see more” where needed
3. Extracts emails from visible text and mailto: links

That’s it.

• No DOM mutation beyond expanding content.
• No hidden scraping.
• No background execution.

This was critical for staying within Chrome Web Store policies.

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What’s Next

I’m keeping the roadmap intentionally conservative:

• Minor UX improvements
• Performance tweaks
• Optional export formats

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If you’re curious, feel free to check out the repo:
👉 https://github.com/yagnesh97/reach-in

Happy building.