Waltham-based business information provider ZoomInfo — a customer relationship manager and marketer’s best friend — today announced expansion of their award-winning technology, an expansion that leverages contact information sitting idle in your email. Just how potent is this new technology? In a market test where a whopping 25,000 people opted in, over 1 million new contacts were added to the ZoomInfo business contact directory.

This latest technology from ZoomInfo is a plug-in that finds active business contacts in your email messages and automatically uploads the information to the ZoomInfo directory. What would you receive in return for installing the plugin and allowing ZoomInfo to scrape your email? How about free, ongoing access to the entire ZoomInfo database of millions of profile information. Given this value, the company is branding the release as its ZoomInfo Community Edition.

ZoomInfo is different from other providers like Spoke, Hoover’s and Jigsaw with its focus on patented technology. At this technology’s core are crawlers that continually scrape pages like news sources, company sites and financial info. In doing so ZoomInfo aggregates parsed contact information in various places across the web, collecting and updating information on an individual person and business basis.

This new plug-in does not require users to manually upload contacts, and access to the full ZoomInfo contact directory is not metered (that is, it is not based on the number of contacts you contribute from your email). As long as the ZoomInfo Contact Contributor plug-in is active, you can access detailed profiles of more than 50 million employees and five million businesses.

“Only our technology innovations are capable of keeping up with the thousands of daily changes across businesses that quickly render B2B contact data obsolete,” said ZoomInfo President Sam Zales. “Businesses rely on accurate contact information to succeed and our new program represents a leap toward our mission of mapping the entire business landscape in real time.”

Today’s announcement sweeten’s the company’s offerings to all its customers, contributing even more up to date and correct contact information for startups to its Fortune 1000 customers like Microsoft, Amazon, Yahoo!, Wal-Mart and Time-Warner.