How to Find Anyone’s Email Address for Lazy People (like Me)

Finding someone’s email address is something we all need on a weekly basis. Whether it’s for link building in SEO, planning events, promoting your latest blog post, finding prospects to sell your product/service to or reaching out to a VIP.

There are many ways to find someone’s email address, but in an attempt to save everybody’s time, I ordered them by what I consider the best way to find someone’s email address (highest probability/shortest time to find an email). Here it goes, let’s make it easy to find an email address for free!

 

LinkedIn + FindThatLead

Almost everybody has a LinkedIn account nowadays, and some great email lookup tools blossomed with it like FindThatLead. Here is how to get and email address from a LinkedIn profile:

1. Find the target’s LinkedIn profile and visit it
2. Click on the FindThatLead Chrome Extension
3. A pop-up will show with that person’s email address and the degree of confidence associated

For instance, I just found Neil Patel’s email address by name:

Pretty easy to find emails from LinkedIn profiles, right?

Alternatively, you can connect to the person you want to target on LinkedIn and you will often times get the email address from their LinkedIn’s profile (on the top-right of their profile).

You can also visit your FindThatLead account and directly search by domain, profession, location or a combination of all of this.

Also, as you must know, LinkedIn allows you to download your connections list as a CSV in which the person’s email address is included. You can export your LinkedIn connections here. To find email addresses from your LinkedIn connections.

That implies that you’re connected with that person on LinkedIn. If you’re not, do that first to use this method!

Google Search

Let’s start with the most effective and quickest method to find email addresses by name: Google advanced search with operators.

Here are some ways to do it:

• “*@company.com” “First name” “Last name”
• “*@company.com” “Full name” “email”

In order to use those, just copy and paste them into Google and replace “company.com” by the person’s company domain and “First name”, “Last name” or “Full name” by their real one.

Twitter

Influential people often get tweeted. And if you’re lucky, sometimes they’ll have been asked their email address as a conclusion to a tweet conversation and gave it away. Let’s quickly check it out!

@TBilesimo email me at hello@ambroisedebret.marketing 🙂

— Ambroise Debret (@AmbroiseDebret) February 2, 2017

You could also use Twitter as a last resort and tweet them to ask for their email.

 

Personal or Company Website to Find Email Addresses

Still, haven’t found that person’s email address? Time for some stalking!

1. The prospect has a personal website

If that’s the case, that’s good news for you! That person most certainly was given an email address when she purchased her domain name.

Few options:

• Try hunter.io with a search for this domain name
• Use their contact form if they have one
• Visit their website’s terms of service or privacy policy. People often include their email in there so that people can ask them questions about their legal terms if they have some.

2. The prospect works in a company

In that case, visit the company’s website and search for a “team” or “contact” page. Most of the time, you’ll be able to find that person’s email in there (if you hadn’t already with a google search!).

3. The prospect guest-blogs or writes on other websites

Then he’ll most-likely have an “author bio” at the top or the bottom of his articles with his picture, name, personal website and sometimes (drum roll) email address!

Generate Possible Email Addresses and Check Them with Rapportive

As a last resort (this one is longer), you can use two tools that work together to find anyone’s email address: a google drive spreadsheet that will give you multiple possible variations of someone’s email address and a chrome extension called Rapportive.

First,  get my possible emails generator. To be able to use it, create your own copy in your Google Drive (click on file, then on “Create a copy”).

Then, here is how it works:

1. Enter the first & last names of the person you’re trying to reach as well as the domain name of the company. It will then give you around 50 possible email addresses to guess from.
2. Open Gmail with Rapportive (Chrome extension) to figure out which address is the real one: you just need to copy-paste the resulting email addresses in the “to:” field and hover on them one by one until Rapportive lights up and shows you social profiles linked to this email address (and by doing so, it confirms the email address)!

 

Summary

Finding someone’s email address can seem like a daunting task, but it’s not that hard when you have the right tools and process to go about it.

Here are the ways to find anyone’s email address that works best according to my personal experience.

• LinkedIn with either hunter.io or by having the person as a connection and downloading your contact’s emails
• A simple Google search with operators
• A Twitter search
• Stalking their personal or company website
• Generating possible email addresses and checking them with Rapportive

Do you have other techniques to find someone’s email address? Let me know in the comments!