So you want to find someone’s email address.
Maybe you want to reach out to an influencer, prospect a list of potential sales leads or maybe you just want to ask someone a quick question.
There are lots of reasons why you might be looking for a particular email address. Fortunately, there are also lots of different (smart) ways to find them.
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Why It’s Important to Find the Right Email Address
If you are sending an important email, you need to get it in front of the right person. Why? Because it’s darn hard to get people’s attention. Be aware that only 8.5% of outreach emails receive a response.
Getting the right person to read your email improves your chances of getting the response you want. So spending time to find someone’s email address and tweak your message is 100% worth it.
This is especially true if you’re trying to reach someone you don’t know or you never spoke to before.
Now, let’s go email hunting…
How to Find Someone’s Email Address?
Here are some of the most solid tactics and tools I’ve used in the past — and still keep using — for finding a person’s email address. Let’s start!
1. Use an Email Lookup Tool
One of the easiest ways to find an email address is to use an email lookup service. All you need to do is enter a person’s name and/or a website, and the tool will search for the relevant address for you.
While they can be incredibly useful, you’re not guaranteed to get a successful result every time you use it. The free searches are limiting and the paid options can end up being quite expensive, especially if you don’t get the addresses you’re looking for.
The good news is that there’s an almost endless list of email lookup tools on the web, so you’ve got lots of options to see what works for you.
Email lookup services all work in mostly the same way: you input a name, try to refine it down as much as possible, and the tool goes and finds the best email.
Having said that, there are a few different pricing options and types of tools available.
Here are a few of the most popular email lookup tools to get you started (along with how much they cost):
- Email Finder from Hunter – 50 free searches/month. Paid accounts from $49/month for 1,000 searches ($0.049/search).
- Wiza – 25 free searches/month. Paid accounts from $49/mo, including 500 searches ($0.098/search). Note: Wiza is powered by real-time email verification and will only charge against your searches for successfully verified emails.
- Finder Expert– 300 free searches/month. Paid accounts from $39 per month for 5,000 searches ($0.008/search).
- Snov.io – 50 free searches/month. Paid accounts from $29 for 1,000 single searches or 500 bulk searches ($0.029/search).
- Voila Norbert – Free trial of 50 free searches. Paid accounts from $49/month for 1,000 searches ($0.049/search).
- FindThatLead – 50 free searches/month. Paid accounts from $49/month for 5,000 searches ($0.0098/search).
- eMail-Prospector Pro – Free trial of 50 free searches. Paid accounts from $1,195 per year, limited to 4,000 searches ($0.299/search).
- FindEmails.com – Free trial of 50 free searches. Paid accounts from $19/month for 500 searches ($0.038/search).
- ContactOut – 40 free searches/month. Paid accounts from $948/year ($79/month) for 6,000 searches ($0.158/search).
How to Find Someone’s Email Address for Free?
If your budget is tight, here are three quick ways to find emails for free:
- Clearbit Connect is a Gmail and Outlook add-on that looks for a person’s email from a variety of sources as well as their own database (related: check out the best Gmail add-ons and extensions to improve your productivity).
- GetProspect is a Chrome extension that allows you to find someone’s email address by their name and domain.
- RocketReach can quickly find emails for you, especially if your target is fairly high profile. Just sign up for a free account and start email hunting.
2. Use “@domainname.com” on DuckDuckGo
This little-known trick is a great way to find email addresses simply by using an alternative search engine.
Running an exact match search for “@domainname.com” in DuckDuckGo will give you results for any email addresses attached to the domain that are publicly available.
You can include the name of your prospect in the search if you’re looking to contact someone in particular, or just keep it generic.
It’s a handy trick that works great in DuckDuckGo and several other search engines. Unfortunately, Google uses “@” for social media tags, so this trick won’t work and it doesn’t work in Bing either.
3. Use Twitter
People sometimes include their email addresses in their tweets or Twitter bio but try to hide them from bots by using “dot” and “at” instead of “.” and “@”.
Head to Twitter Advanced Search and search your prospect’s tweets for “at” and “dot”.
You’ll be able to choose exact phrases to look for, words to ignore, hashtags, specific accounts and time frames. Have a play around with the inputs here. Try including words such as “email”, “reach” or “contact” to better filter the results.
It sounds bold, but you can also try simply asking them on Twitter for their email address.
To give your tweet the best chance of being noticed and getting a response, keep it concise and include a compelling reason for them to reply:
You can also approach them through their direct messages, which your prospect may be more likely to look at than their replies or mentions. Depending on their privacy settings, you may need to be following each other first before you’re able to send them a DM.
How to Check Old Tweets From Anyone?
There’s actually a final tactic you can try with Twitter to check the past tweets of users. By using the All My Tweets app, you can generate a list up to 3200 of past tweets from anyone for free.
Here’s how to use it:
Go to All My Tweets and log in with your Twitter account.
Then enter the Twitter handle of the website or person you’d like to connect with to get their tweets.
Once you have these listed out, just hit Ctrl/Cmd+F and search for stuff like @domainname, “contact”, “email”, “you can reach me at”, and other variations that might show an email address.
4. Subscribe to Your Prospects Email List
Most websites will have an email list.
If your prospect’s website or blog features a newsletter, subscribe to their mailing list as many newsletters are sent from a personal email address. This can be a quick and easy way to obtain the email address you’re looking for.
Even if it’s sent from a generic info@ address, try replying to one of the newsletters to share an opinion or ask an insightful question and you might get a response.
This can help you to build a relationship with the prospect and gives you a better chance of getting hold of their personal email addresses in the future.
5. Ask via Generic Email Address or Contact Form
Most websites have a contact form on their website or provide a generic info@ email address for general inquiries.
While these are likely manned by admin staff, you can try using them to ask how to get in touch with your ideal prospect.
6. Check Out Contact & About Us Pages
Sometimes the simplest solutions are the best. Many websites include personal email addresses on the contact, about us or meet the team pages.
However, often these pages can be tricky to find in the site’s navigation. If you can’t see what you’re looking for, check the footer or try these common URL formats:
- example.com/contact
- example.com/contact-us
- example.com/contact-me
- example.com/about
- example.com/about-me
- example.com/about-us
- example.com/team
- example.com/our-team
- example.com/meet-the-team
7. Check Out Author Pages
Another simple starting point is the author page on your prospect’s blog or website, which is linked to from their name on any article that they have written.
There can often be a lot of information on this page, especially if they have used default WordPress themes and settings.
8. Do a WHOIS Lookup
If you’re trying to find an email address of someone with a website (maybe an independent business owner, entrepreneur, or writer) you can sometimes find their contact information in their website’s WHOIS information.
WHOIS data is used when registering a domain and is publicly available, giving you information about who owns the domain. Everyone with a website is required by law to share their contact details. Just head over to who.is and search the domain of the email you are looking for:
By the way, there are other WHOIS lookup tools available like, such as:
It doesn’t really matter which tool you use. If you are lucky, you may see the email used to register this domain. However, WHOIS offers an option to hide your public information from their public data, so this might not always work.
9. Use Google (And Search Operators)
Apologies: this an obvious one, but can still be overlooked. Use Google for its intended use: searching.
Type in your prospect’s name along with “email address” and you might get lucky.
However, if the person you are searching for has a common name, this may prove difficult. Even if they have a unique name you may not get very far.
You can help narrow down the search with some Google search operators. These are super easy to use. Just enter the operator into Google and search away:
- [name] + email (or) email address
- [name] + contact (or) contact information (or) contact me
- [name] + “home town”
- [name] + “company they work for”
- [name] + LinkedIn
- [name] + ZoomInfo
- [name] + email
- [name] + contact
If you know a bit about more information about your prospect (like where they work) you can try these:
- site:companywebsite.com + [name] + email
- site:companywebsite.com + [name] + contact
- site:companywebsite.com + firstname.lastname [at] companyname.com
- site:companywebsite.com + firstnamelastname [at] companyname.com
- site:companywebsite.com + firstname [at] companyname.com
- site:companywebsite.com + firstname_lastname [at] companyname.com
10. Use Facebook
When setting up a Facebook page, people often enter as much information as they can and then forget about it.
Just head over to the about page on the profile and you’ll be able to see the email address if they have added it:
This makes Facebook a great place to search for email addresses for your prospects and will likely give you their most frequently used email address instead of something more generic.
11. Check Your Own Email List
Depending on your own visibility within your industry, you might find that some of your prospects have already subscribed to your newsletter.
A quick search of your email list could reveal exactly what you’re looking for with zero hassle.
Most email marketing software will allow you to search your list for contacts. Here’s what it looks like in Mailchimp for example:
12. Export your LinkedIn Connections
Did you know that LinkedIn allows you to export your connections?
So if you’re connected with your prospect, you may be able to get hold of their email address.
How to export LinkedIn connections?
Step 1 – Click Me at the top of your LinkedIn homepage, then select Settings & Privacy from the dropdown.
Step 2 – Click to the Privacy tab and scroll down to the Getting a copy of your data (under the How LinkedIn uses your data section):
Step 3 – Tick the connections box and hit Request archive.
In about 10 minutes or so, you’ll get an email with all your connections’ email addresses in a handy spreadsheet.
This method should be used responsibly to prevent you from losing your LinkedIn account.
13. Take an Educated Guess
If you think about it, pretty much all email addresses follow the same handful of patterns. They are often based on quite simple formats.
So if you know your prospect’s first name, surname, and domain, you might be able to guess their email address.
If you already have the email address of someone else at the same company, you can probably figure out which structure they use.
If not, try these common formulas:
- [name]@example.com
- [name].[surname]@example.com
- [name][surname]@example.com
- [initial].[surname]@example.com
Summary
There we have it, how to find someone’s email addresses. Just remember: with great power comes great responsibility.
So use these email finding methods wisely. Don’t spam people! Don’t sell people’s email addresses. And don’t annoy people you are reaching out to… you’re the only missing a great opportunity to connect and build (business) connections.
Head of Content at Kinsta and Content Marketing Consultant for WordPress plugin developers. Connect with Matteo on Twitter.
None of that stuff is free! I know I tried
Most of the tools come with a free option which is obviously limited, but still, you can perform some searches every month for free.