This situation happened to all of us at least once : you want to send an e-mail to someone, but don’t know his or her adress. Weither it is someone you just met and you didn’t exchange cards, or you want to do targeted email marketing, or you are just applying for a job and don’t want to send an email at job@company.com.
Here is a quick guide on how to find someone’s email address.
Idea 1 : Send an inMail on Linkedin
Maybe you had the idea to contact them on Linkedin or Viadeo, but the problem is you have to pay a monthly subscription to send them a message. And it’s not the only one! Others are not on Linkedin, it has more chance to be ignored and in some cases, such as applying for a job it’s not even a solution…
Idea 2 : Find the e-mail adress on the web
Maybe you tried to search for the email adress on the web in places such as the company’s website, but it is often hard to find. If you are a salesperson or a marketing guy, you can still by mailing lists, but you generally don’t have the choice on the people on the list and can’t target specific peoples.
Here are some good queries to find emails on Google :
Idea 3 : Guess the email with patterns
Maybe you know that most of the companies use a specific email format for their company such as firstname.lastname@company.com so if you already know the pattern : bingo, you have the email! You don’t know the pattern ? You can still try them one by one by sending you email.
Idea 4 : Use Rapportive to find the email
If you don’t know the pattern used in a company, you can only try to guess which on it is. A good way to do is to make the list of every possible email pattern using a spreadshit like this one and paste them one by one in you Gmail account to test if they exist using Rapportive (EDIT: now bought by Linkedin).
Rapportive is a nice plugin for Gmail which shows you social networks linked to an email address. So when you paste an email, if it shows you the picture of the guy and some social networks linked it has a good chance to be the right email address !
The Rapportive technique to find email adresses works great, but it has some big problems also :
- You can’t find anybody’s email address as it is only limited to those that Rapportive know.
- Some people don’t have social network account, or they are not linked to their professionnal email address.
- It’s still mostly manual to create and test emails one by one ! But if you know how to run a Python script, you can automate email checking with Rapportive (until they change their mind and put some more restrictions on their API…)
Idea 5 : Use Email checkers to find the email
Another idea could be to directly check if each email exist by querying email servers with a mx request. You can for example connect to the webserver with Telnet and check if it responds with an error code or not for each one.
There are some tools to do it without Telnet, just type “Email checker” on Google.
A good one is MailTester.
Still, there are several problems with this method to find emails :
- Some servers don’t respond with an error, even if the email exist
- You still have to check emails one by one, unless you code something to check all emails validity
- If you send too much queries you can be listed in the SBL (not good)
- Most of these tools are limited to 5 free queries
Email Finder – How to find (almost) anyone’s e-mail address (the ultimate solution)
As none of the previous solutions were fully satisfying, we created Datananas to have a very accurate e-mail guessing tool. It has a built in email finder to help you find professional emails browsing social networks.
You just have to add contacts from Linkedin, and the tool will automatically guess email adresses for you. That’s all.
Datananas will combine various methods to find or guess almost anyone’s e-mail adress, from a huge database of email patterns, searching the web or querying APIs, to querying servers.
You can try Datananas for free to find email adresses faster than ever
Sources :
How To Find Someone’s Email Address In Under A Minute
How to Find Email Addresses
Find (Almost) Anybody’s Email Address
How to Find the Unfindable: 12 Ways to Find Anyone’s Personal Email Address
The Complete Guide To Finding Any Email Address: Tools, Tips, Tactics, And More
Top 10 Tips to Find Anybody’s Email Address
9 Ways To Find Anyone’s Email Address
Find the Person Behind an Email Address
