5 Ways To Find Anyone's Email Address
Entrepreneurs and salespeople feel the pain. You have a wonderful product that should be a perfect fit for the company, however there’s no way to reach the (apparent) decision maker. So you try. You cold call, wrestle with the gatekeepers and send messages through linkedin and twitter. Still the easiest way to get attention and a quick go / no-go is an email. Assuming that you’ve managed to pull of the key decision maker’s name of Linkedin or any other social network, here are 5 Ways To Find Anyone’s Email Address.
Please note that I strongly adhere to a polite email etiquette and that you should only use these methods to write someone with a personalized message, not for mass-marketing.
Toofr
Toofr does the guesswork for you by automatically guessing and testing different email formats based on you filling in a first name, last name and an email domain. Toofr will test a number of pre-defined formats, such as [email protected] and test its validity. Toofr is a paid service, however doesn’t charge if they guess an email with a certainty score below 40. First 100 credits are free, and it rarely happens that the certainty score is above 40.
Tip: Guessing the right email address becomes difficult for people with double first- or last names. Companies often omit one of the 2 names, so ‘Johnson – Stafford’ will become either ‘Johnson’ or ‘Stafford’ as a last name.
Email-formats.com
This website allows you to check what the most likely structure of an emailadress is for a company domain. Based on their database of email formats and scraped addresses from across the web they allow you to take an educated guess at the appropriate structure of an email address for a company domain.
Mailtester
When you had Toofr guess the most likely result, fill out the email address on mailtester. This is a service that tests whether the company has a mail server setup for the domain. Mailtester also checks whether an email exists on a certain domain, so you can be 100% sure that you’re mailing to an existing email address. The latter is not always possible as some companies have blocked email verification.
Tip: If your contact has a double last name, mailtester allows you to play around and test different formats that Toofr doesn’t.
Rapportive
Rapportive is a gmail / chrome plugin that shows Linkedin profiles in your inbox based on the email address provided. Very nifty, but rapportive can also be used to verify email addresses. Simply type in the email address in the ‘to’ field, and if the email address is tied to a linkedin profile, the profile will popup in rapportive.
This may work for people that have a business email setup with their linkedin account.
All-in-one services
There are a bunch of ‘all-in-one’ emailtester out there that attempt to automate all the processes above. The Anymail Finder App asks you to fill out a name and company domain and if there’s a match, provide you with the email address. Voilanorbert is another alternative to an all-on-one email finder. In my experience this doesn’t work as well as the ‘manual’ methods, so certainly don’t give up when these apps return zero results!
Finding personal email addresses can work in the same way, but the domain names very. Gmail does allow email verification via mailtester, yahoo and hotmail don’t. Also personal email addresses tend to vary more in structure, as they’re not tied to a ‘corporate’ format. Using a combination of the methods above will help you get an email address 95% of the time.
Update (April 1st, 2015)
Connect6
I recently came across Connect6, a service that displays information in real-time. For example, you could browse someone’s Linkedin profile and see their available contact information in the Connect6 browser plugin. I have also used Connect6 to easily build lists of prospects with a certain profession (e.g. project manager). Connect6 is a paid service that let’s you build lists of email addresses based on a searchquery. Note that a lot of the email address are personal and that if you’re building a list for business prospecting, inquiries on a personal mail address are not always appreciated!
Sellhack
Although their service was initially battered by lawsuits from Linkedin, Sellhack.com has reinvented itself and proves to be a nifty tool that combines prospect discovery, email address search and list building in one tool. Although it is a paid service I have found this tool to be very usefull and it quickly provides me with email addresses for people with Linkedin profiles.
Full disclosure: the link provided for Sellhack is a personal signup link. If you signup we both get 50 Sellhack credits.
Update (August 10th, 2015)
Emailhunter
My co-worker Guillermo found this little gem in the Chrome webstore. Emailhunter let’s you discover emailaddresses based on only a domainname! Emailhunter also has a nifty chrome plugin that let’s you search email addresses associated with any linkedin account.
The only disadvantage is that Emailhunter doesn’t allow you to discover a specific person’s emailaddress, and in my opinion, Emailhunter is great add-on to email search, but not the core solution I would rely on to fill a database. Also, the free version doesn’t allow you to export a CSV, so for high-volume lead generation campaigns you’ll probably better off paying up.
5 Ways To Find Anyone’s Email Address was originally published on The Upstart