10 Ways to Find Anyone's Email Address

If you're here, you're looking for someone's email address, and you're having a hard time.

This post exists to list every possible method you can use to find the email address you're looking for:

1. Use an email finder
2. Guess and verify their email address
3. Look around the company website
4. Use Google
5. Check social media profiles
6. Just reach out
7. Subscribe to the prospect’s newsletter
8. Check WHOIS records
9. Ask for an introduction
10. Check your own email list

We've ordered these 10 methods by efficiency. Try them in this order to get the best results with the least amount of time invested. You can use this checklist to help you.

1. Use an email finder

Your best bet if you're looking for anyone's business email address is to use an email-finding tool like Hunter's Email Finder. It's free to use, and it will help you find many email addresses in no time.

Simply create a free Hunter account and go to the Finder page.

Once there, enter the person’s name and website address (or company name) in the input box and click "Find."

Here's what's happening under the hood:

1. The Email Finder checks Hunter's database of email addresses found publicly on the web. If the website of the company you provided contains an address of a person you're looking for, the Email Finder will surface it.
2. If we didn't find the right address, or haven't yet discovered that website, the Email Finder will attempt to guess the email address.

Our Email Finder is fine-tuned to maximize accuracy. This means that you might not find some people's addresses if we aren't sure they're safe to contact. It also won't be helpful if you're looking for personal contact information.

If, for whatever reason, you weren't able to find an address using the Email Finder, try the other methods listed below.

2. Guess and verify their email address

If the Email Finder doesn't find the email address you're looking for, you can try guessing the address yourself. Even though the Email Finder also tries to guess the address if it can't find it otherwise, it's designed to be conservative because we want to avoid providing invalid addresses.

Plus, when you try to guess the address on your end, you have additional options of verifying it.

Let's dive in.

Create a list of candidate email addresses

Companies often use consistent patterns when creating new email addresses for their employees.

If you know their first and last name, and the URL of their website, you can likely guess your target’s email address.

According to a study we conducted at Hunter, 49.9% of the companies use the {first}@example.com email pattern.

After analyzing more than 12 million email addresses, we’ve found out that the most common formats are:

You can also use Email Permutator to do the work for you. It figures out all possible email combinations in a single click.

However, you should also look at the website associated with the address you're looking for to try and find the email pattern used by the company.

To streamline your search for the pattern, you can use the Domain Search. This tool automatically surfaces all email addresses we found on a given domain, and analyzes them to show you the email pattern.

With small or new websites, you may not find the data you're looking for in the Domain Search, so you can manually review them instead.

Verify the candidate addresses

Once you have a list of candidate addresses (and, hopefully, your best candidate is based on the email pattern used on the domain), you need to verify them.

Contacting them without prior verification is risky, because most of these addresses don't really exist. And since they don't exist, the emails you send to them will bounce back and lower your sender reputation!

There are two methods of verification you can consider:

1. Hunter's Email Verifier

Hunter’s Email Verifier checks the validity of any email address to minimize the risks of your emails bouncing.

Validations are made on multiple levels: format, domain information, the response of the mail servers, and comparison with our unique base of 100+ million professional email addresses.

All you need to do is enter an email address into the input box and click “Verify.”

You can see that this email address is valid and can be used safely.

Read more: How to Verify Email Address Without Sending an Email

2. Google Sheets

You can also use Google Sheets to try to verify candidate addresses. This method isn't 100% accurate, but if a given email address is hosted by Google Workspace, the accuracy is near-perfect.

Create a new Google Sheet and paste the email addresses you generated. Then select them all, right click and select "Smart chips" > "Convert to people chip"

The assumption behind this method is that valid email addresses will be successfully converted to a people chip.

I created a spreadsheet you can copy and use to automate using the people chip method for Google-hosted addresses. Again, remember that it's not as safe as using Hunter's Email Verifier.

3. Look around the company website

A company website is a great source of information when you're looking for company decision-makers and their email addresses.

At Hunter, we’ve analyzed about 905,000 company websites and have found out that 18.7% of them mentioned at least one email address.

As we noticed, there are a few specific pages on company websites where email addresses are published more often:

About page

On this page, you might find almost anything, from brief bios with personal social media accounts to detailed contact information of every team member.

Contact Us page

On the “Contact Us” page, you may often see generic contact forms, but some companies add the contact information of the team members who can help with specific requests.

Author page

Since most companies have blogs, another effective way to find email addresses is to visit each author's individual author page.

Usually, you need to click on the image of the blog post author (or their name), and you’ll be able to get the author's personal information. In some cases, you can find all of the information right under the blog post in the author's bio box.

Some of your prospects may have personal blogs, and usually, it’s much easier to find their email addresses there. Just check the “About” and “Contact” pages.

4. Use Google

If you didn't find any useful information on the company website, it doesn't mean the email address you're looking for isn't listed elsewhere on the web.

That where Google comes in handy.

Confirm a candidate address with a Google Search

You have a couple of email address that you think are correct. Now it’s time to search for them on Google and see if they're indeed accurate.

Use advanced search operators to help make your search more precise.

Here's an example of how easy it is to find the email address of Buffer’s founder, Joel Gascoigne.

I'm using quotations so that Google only returns the results that contain the exact string I'm looking for.

Search with target keywords

Type in the name of the person whose email address you're looking for and add “email,” “contact,” etc. to find web pages that might contain their address.

If the email address is published anywhere online, it'll help you to narrow down the list and find only relevant results.

You can also experiment with adding other personal information to the queries such as position, previous companies, city, etc.

Search company website with Google search operators

You'd be surprised how much hidden information you can find on company websites. Email addresses aren't an exception.

So what you need to do is search Google using the search operator query “site:example.com” as your root and add some modifiers, like in this example:

Here you can see how easy it is:

You can be creative with modifiers to make your search even more specific.

Also, if you have a suggestion that you are pretty sure is the correct email address, you can try to search for it on the company website like this:

site:example.com + suggestion@example.com

Don’t forget to verify your findings

As previously mentioned, don’t forget to verify your findings before sending emails. You can use the same proven trick with Hunter’s Email Verifier or Gmail verification.

5. Check social media profiles

If you can find someone’s social media profiles, the chances are that you’ll be able to find their email address there.

Here are some tips on how to do it with Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

Facebook

When trying to find bloggers or general company email addresses, Facebook can be an excellent source to check.

Head to your target's page and open the “About” section.

Most bloggers and small businesses put their contact details in this section. However, you can also often see the info@, hello@, contact@ email addresses that are not that useful if you're looking to do personalized outreach.

LinkedIn

For LinkedIn, you may need to connect with the prospect to see their email address and other personal information.

Once you're connected, open the prospect's LinkedIn profile, click Contact Info, and the chances are that you’ll find what you're looking for there.

You can also check your the About section on the person's LinkedIn profile. People often share their email addresses or email addresses of those who work with them there.

Finally, you can try exporting your LinkedIn connections. Note that this will only work if the person hasn’t opted to hide their email address from their LinkedIn connections.

Here’s how to do it:

Log in to LinkedIn, click the drop-down menu that has your profile photo on it, and then click on Settings & Privacy.

On the next page, click on Get a copy of your data, select the “Want something in particular? Select the data files you're most interested in.” option, and then check the Connections box.

Finally, click the Request archive button.

LinkedIn will email you once your export is ready. It usually takes about ten minutes.

You’ll receive an email to download a .csv file containing a list of all your connections and their email addresses (where available). With some luck, the email address you’re looking for should be there.

Twitter

The most obvious way you may think of is to check the prospect's bio on Twitter.

But since the bio is very limited in space, most people put other essential links and information here. Moreover, having a publicly listed email address on Twitter (that could be easily scraped) increases the chances of getting a lot of spam emails.

Since sometimes people tweet their email addresses, you can search past tweets to see if your prospect has ever done it.

You can check this using Twitter’s advanced search, which allows you to search for very specific information in selected Twitter accounts.

Let’s try to find the email address of Product Hunt founder Ryan Hoover this way.

All I need to do is add a keyword…

...and identify the Twitter username:

And that’s it; I found Ryan’s email address in 30 seconds.

Another option for doing the same search is to enter this query into Twitter’s search box:

Search Twitter with Google

This technique is as simple as typing the following into Google Search:

twitter.com/username + “keyword”

Note that for “username,” you must have the person’s current Twitter handle. For “keyword,” you can experiment with other relevant keywords such as “contact,” “email,”  “email at,” etc.

6. Just reach out

If you couldn’t find someone’s email address with any of the techniques mentioned above, try reaching out on social media, asking for a more specific email address, contacting info@ or hello@ email addresses, or even connecting with the company's support via chat.

Reach out on Twitter

Don’t hesitate to find your prospects on Twitter and ask directly for their email address. You can quickly describe why you want to contact them or where you found their social media profile.

Ask for referral via a generic email address

Usually, it’s effortless to find a generic email on a company website. It usually starts with “info” or “contact” + @domain.com.

At Hunter, we analyzed about 38 million generic email addresses and found out that the most common templates that companies publish on their websites are:

If you write a short email describing who you are, who you need to contact, and why, the chances are that someone behind the generic email address will provide you with a personal email address you can contact.

It really doesn’t hurt to ask.

Use the support chat

There is always a human behind the company’s support chat. The communication happens in real-time, so the chances to get a reply fast are high.

7. Subscribe to the prospect’s newsletter

Many companies and bloggers use their personal email addresses to send newsletters. This is an excellent way to build relationships and show that there’s a real human behind the emails.

You can leverage this to find an address they're likely to use on a regular basis.

Step 1: Find the opt-in form & subscribe

Here I’m subscribing to Andrew Chen’s newsletter. He is a startup investor at Andreessen Horowitz and ex-Uber Head of Growth.

Let’s enter an email address and subscribe to the newsletter.

Step 2: Check your inbox

Check your inbox in a few minutes, and you'll find a welcome email or the first part of the newsletter (or, in some cases, an opt-in confirmation email).

Also, you’ll get an email address you were looking for.

Don’t hesitate to hit “Reply” and start a conversation. The chances that your prospect replies are much higher than in the case of sending a completely cold email.

8. Check WHOIS records

If you're trying to find the email address of someone who owns a website or blog, you can do it with WHOIS.

WHOIS is a query and response protocol that is widely used for querying databases that store basic information about a registered domain, such as domain owner contact information, domain availability status, and company details.

All you need is perform a WHOIS search of the prospect's domain on one of many websites that provide access to the WHOIS database. For example, WHO.IS, Namecheap, or GoDaddy.

Let’s give it a try and search for the owner of Ahrefs.com.

9. Ask for an introduction

Think about whether you have a mutual acquaintance with your prospect. If so, it doesn’t hurt to ask for an introduction.

On social media, you can easily determine whether you have any shared connections.

Let’s take a look at this example: I want to connect with Typeform's CEO, Joaquim Lecha, and all I have is his LinkedIn profile.

I can easily check if we have any mutual connections, and if someone I know is well-connected to Joaquim (like my friend or colleague), I can quickly reach out to them and ask if they can make an introduction.

You can ask for an introduction using this short and straight-to-the-point message:

“Hey [name], I saw you are connected to [target person]. Mind making an introduction so I can [1-2 sentences maximum about the reason you want to connect]?”

Or you can just simply ask for the right email address to contact your prospect, and when contacting, mention the person who provided you with it.

Just drop a few lines, and that’s it.

10. Check your own email list

If you have a big email list, you might already have the person’s email address stored there. Here’s how to find it if you’re using Mailchimp for email marketing:

Log in to your Mailchimp account, and go to Audience > All contacts.

Choose the appropriate email list from the dropdown box and click View Contacts.

Finally, click the magnifying glass icon to search for the person whose email address you need.

Wrap up

You've reached the end of this guide. Now it's time to take action.

My advice is to start playing around with these tactics in the descending order (if the first one fails, try the second one, and so on). Eventually, you'll be able to find the email address you're looking for.