How to Find Email Addresses (2K+ Free Credits Inside)​

What’s the easiest way to find someone’s email address? The first thing that usually comes to mind is checking their contact page.

Sounds logical.

This is what that page is for, after all. But what if all it has is a generic email like info@domain.com? Sending messages, especially marketing pitches, there feels like throwing them into a black hole. Unless you offer a six-figure paycheck, of course. 🙂

Then, how about visiting their team page that should reveal more info about employees, including their email addresses?

Makes sense.

But I checked around 1,3K team pages during my last email search, and only 11% of them had employees’ contact details. In 89% of cases, I was out of luck. That’s what you should expect too, give or take.

The good thing is an email search doesn’t end on contact and team pages.

Although people are cagey about any personal info today, it still surfaces here and there on the web. Some companies collect that data into email lists from Facebook groups or pages, blog posts, and many other places to further share it with their customers via email finder tools.

Learn how to find email addresses, both with the help of such tools and other tricks you didn’t think of before. Not only will you improve email deliverability (a very critical thing) but also will have more responses in your inbox at the end of the day.

Free email finders and how to use them

Let’s start with email finders, as they can let you do the job much quicker than a manual search. No web browsing for hours. The whole process comes down to typing in a few words like your prospect’s name or their domain or both.

There’s no shortage of email finding tools on the market for sure. Some require a paid subscription only, while others offer some sort of a freebie:

• a free plan where email search credits get renewed every month;
• a trial with a limited amount of free credits given one time only.

Like I said in the title, this post includes only tools providing free credits. In total, you’ll get 2,288 credits at no cost (1,873 per month and 415 for once).

While email lookup tools work the same way, their feature packs still differ. Imagine how much time it takes to test them all yourself and filter out those that lack necessary functionalities. It’d keep you up late, right?

To save you long hours of testing, I took it upon myself. Below, you can learn about the major features and how they differ in each tool on my list.

1. What options you can set for an email search

In email prospecting, you can find yourself at different stages.

Sometimes, you know your prospect’s full name and employer. Other times, you only have a list of companies to connect with but have no idea whom to contact there.

To get you covered in any circumstances, email finders provide various search options.

Email search by name and company (or domain)

This option will come in handy when you have a clear idea of who your prospect is and where they work.

To discover their email address, type in both their full name and company (or its domain).

Example of how to find email addresses by name and company from GetProfiles

Email search by company (or domain) only

Do you know the company you want to collaborate with but aren’t sure about the best person to reach out to?

Then, this option is for you.

Type in your target company’s name (or its domain), and you’ll see all the employees available in the tool’s database, along with their emails and oftentimes job titles.

Example of how to find email addresses by domain from Email Discovery Tool

The cool thing is it usually costs a single credit to check many emails under the same domain.

Email search by name only

With this option, you can find someone’s email address by their first and last names.

It’s convenient, as you may not always know where your prospect works at the moment.

For example, you might have found them on the page of 2017. Back then, they represented Apple but could have switched jobs over the last three years.

It can hardly make any sense to look up emails by their name and the company they worked for a few years ago. That’s why some email finders let you leave out employer details.

Example of how to find email addresses by name from RocketReach

What if your preferred tool lacks such an option? Check your prospect’s current employer on LinkedIn beforehand.

Email search by city, address, and prospect’s other details

To narrow down your search, some email finder tools provide a bunch of extra filters.

Let’s say you are at an early stage of email prospecting. You still wonder what companies to contact but have a clear understanding of their location, industry, size, revenue, and stuff like that.

By mentioning any of these search criteria, you’ll get more relevant results.

Example of extra email search options from LeadMine

Here are 30 email finders compared by their search criteria and filters.

2. Install Chrome extensions to find email addresses outside the apps

In the first place, email search tools are available as web apps but many of them also come packed with extensions, mostly for Chrome.

With their help, you won’t have to switch between your app interface and other open tabs all the time.

Just click the extension icon in your browser to discover emails from wherever you are. It can be your prospect’s site, social profile, or even Google search results.

Kudos to someone who’s come up with such a clever idea and others who’ve shamelessly replicated it!

Kudos aside, email finder extensions can expand your search with a few more options. Here they are.

Social media email search

It’s perfect for those of you who want to find someone’s email on LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter.

When you enter your prospect’s social profile, click the extension icon and wait a few secs for their address to show up.

Example of how to find someone’s email on LinkedIn from Slik

Example of how to find someone’s email on Facebook from SignalHire

Example of how to find someone’s email on Twitter from Prophet II Turbo

Besides extensions, this option is sometimes built right into email finder apps. To perform a search, copy and paste someone’s social URL into the app dashboard.

Example of how to find emails by social URL from FindThatLead

There are some Chrome extensions, such as LeadDelta, that can help you organize your existing Linkedin contacts by bringing them all into a single-view table (CRM).

Besides useful options like tagging, filtering, and sending personalized messages, it also allows you to auto-unlock and export your connections’ information such as email, phone, industry, and more.

On-site email search

Ever found yourself on a website showing high potential and got curious about their contact person?

No need to start a new search for that.

On click, you’ll find email addresses from websites straight away, while you’re on them.

Example of how to find all email addresses on a website from Adapt

Google email search

Your prospects are people involved in your field in one way or another. Logically, content on their sites should match your strategic search queries.

This option can make your email prospecting on Google easier.

When you check sites ranking for your queries, it lets you extract their emails from Google search along the way.

Example of how to find email addresses on Google from Snovio

Feel free to compare email finder extensions by their search options and popularity.

3. What types of email addresses you can find

Generally, all you need is your prospect’s business email. But there are cases when things turn out more complicated than they seem to be.

That’s why such tools let you search for different types of email addresses.

Personal email search

Personal email addresses aren’t tied to company domains. Instead, they come from Gmail, Yahoo, and other free webmail providers.

Example of how to find personal email addresses from ContactOut

Wonder why you may need to find someone’s personal email?

Imagine that your prospect quit their job at the company where you found them but didn’t indicate that on LinkedIn.

Not sure about you but I can’t think of any other way to learn about their job change.

If you search for their email address by name and domain, your tool will return you their old business email that’s already inactive. Even if it’s not yet, you can hardly expect a reply from there.

While business emails come and go, personal addresses remain with us regardless of our employers.

Does it mean you should contact your prospects via their personal emails only?

Definitely not.

But every time no one opens your message from their business address, try to resend it to the personal one.

Business email search 

Business email addresses are tied to domains that your prospects use on behalf of their companies.

They should be your top priority except for the force majeure cases when there’s no info about someone’s current employment.

Example of how to find business email addresses from VoilaNorbert

Generic email search

Generic email addresses are tied to company domains, but not to someone specific on the team (contact@domain.com, info@domain.com).

Such addresses are also called “role-based,” as they often indicate departments (marketing@domain.com, sales@domain.com, support@domain.com).

Example of how to find generic email addresses from Finder.Expert

Note that you should turn to them only as a last resort when you can’t find business email addresses. But life is pain, and I have to admit that you’ll have no other choice at times.

Learn what types of email addresses each tool on my list can help you find.

4. Use a company email format finder in case the data is missing

Email lookup tools aren’t magic wands, and they won’t provide the data in 100% of your requests. That’s especially common to new hires, as their addresses don’t appear in the tool database overnight.

What can help you figure them out is an email format finder. It will show you the most common email format used at your target company.

Example of how to find a company email address format from LeadGibbon

Then, you can manually check if your prospect has an email formatted that way too.

Enter it into your mailbox address field to see if there appears a pic on hover. If it does, someone must have added it, so that email should be in use.

Note that some tools reveal email formats in company directories. As a rule, you can access them from the footer.

Unfortunately, such a feature isn’t available in too many tools on my list.

5. Check the data accuracy with email verifiers

Using email finders is no doubt the quickest way to find contact details but you can’t blindly trust everything they show.

Their owners don’t even conceal the fact that they can’t guarantee 100% email accuracy.

What they can do is send some tell-tale signs your way.

Email confidence score 

The first metric to check email accuracy is a confidence score calculated in percent. It shows how reliable an email address is according to their estimates and checks.

Here’s how you can interpret the different scores you see.

• High means an email address is deliverable.
• Average means an email address is risky.
• Low means an email address is undeliverable.

Example of an email’s confidence score from FindEmails

Email verification status 

Another way to find out if an email address is valid is to check its verification status. It appears next to or instead of a confidence score, depending on the tool you use.

When verifying email addresses, you’ll come across a few statuses.

• Valid means an email address passed all their checks and is deliverable.
• Catch-all (or accept-all) means an address is tied to one of those domains that accept all emails, whether you send them to name.surname@domain.com or blahblahblah@domain.com. That’s why it’s impossible to check email validity in such cases.
• Invalid means an email address failed to pass at least one check and is undeliverable.

Example of email verification statuses from Skrapp

Email verification process

To verify if an email exists, the system gives it multiple checks.

While each tool has its own verification algorithm, they commonly focus on the following aspects.

• Domain Type. The system makes sure an email isn’t tied to one of those domains used for disposable addresses.
• Server Status. The system verifies MX records on your target domain and the possibility to connect to its SMTP server.
• Email Format. The system checks email syntax, whether it’s valid (name.surname@domain.com) or looks like mumbo jumbo (1e99cs3bp7@domain.com).
• Email Status. The system tests whether an email can bounce and checks if the server has a catch-all policy.

Example of email validity checks from Hunter

Standalone email verifiers

When you perform an email search, you’ll see its verification status right in your email finder dashboard.

But things don’t end there.

Some tools also provide standalone email verifiers. They’ll come in handy if you’ve already found contact details elsewhere and want to double-check them for validity.

Enter any email address you have, and the tool will verify if it’s deliverable.

Example of a standalone email verifier from SellHack

Email address sources

Email lookup tools boast of having millions to billions of contacts in their indexes. But where does that data come from?

Unless an email is their best guess, they should have found it somewhere.

To prove their data reliability, some tools back it up with sources. These are URLs of pages where they discovered people’s contact details.

At least, you can rest assured that their suggestions aren’t taken out of nowhere.

To find the source of an email address, you don’t need to perform any specific search. If your tool has such data, it’ll appear next to emails.

Example of email address sources from MailDB

User rates

Wanna do a good deed and earn a few karma points?

Some tools involve their users in email verification, so this is your chance. They provide an option allowing you to rate their suggestions.

If an email identified as valid bounced for you, feel free to report such a failure by downvoting it.

Example of how to rate email accuracy from Lusha

Here’s how the tools on my list differ in everything related to email verification.

6. What else you can learn about your email prospects

Email prospecting goes far beyond a search for contact details.

You do need to find people’s email addresses to get in touch with them. But at the same time, it won’t hurt to dig deeper into their backgrounds and figure out a better approach to them.

For that reason, many email finders reveal people’s full or at least partial profiles. It’s quite convenient to explore additional details about them along with their emails, all in one place.

You can check anything from their personal data like social accounts, work experience, and skills to company information like size, HQ locations, and even phone numbers.

I don’t advise that you contact people by phone, though.

Let’s face it, the reputation of cold emails is anything but good. And what can be worse than sending cold emails is only making cold calls.

Example of an email prospect profile from GetProspect

Below, you can check what these tools include in their email prospect profiles.

7. Speed things up with bulk email finders

It doesn’t take long to check email addresses when you have a dozen prospects or so.

But we don’t run such small outreach campaigns as a rule, do we? If we did, how many responses would we get?

Guys from Mangools consider a 16% response rate to be a good result, and they’re absolutely right. With a dozen prospects, we could expect 1-2 responses.

Next to nothing…

With hundreds of prospects on the list, imagine how much time it drains to perform an individual email search for everyone.

To put an end to this time-wasting, such tools provide a bulk email finder.

Using this feature, you can upload many email requests in one go and then export results with a single click.

An hour’s work comes down to minutes.

Example of how to find emails in bulk from ColdCRM

Email address verification can go in bulk too.

Did you get hundreds of addresses from God knows where? Use bulk email verifiers to check them all for validity in one go.

Example of how to verify email addresses in bulk from Find That Email

Learn what kind of email searches each tool lets you perform in bulk.

8. Request the data via an email lookup API

Good news for those of you who want to find people’s emails programmatically.

Most of the tools reviewed here provide an email lookup API. With its help, you can integrate their functionalities into your website, app, or CRM software and send email requests through API calls.

9. How much it’ll cost you to find email addresses

Here comes the part that will determine your choice of an email finder like nothing else.

Pricing…

All the tools on my list let you search for emails for free to a certain degree. But still, if you have a crush on one of them and need more credits, you can subscribe to its premium package.

I compared their monthly prices for the cheapest plan along with the number of email credits available there. That’s what a price per lookup is based on.

Note that some free email finders won’t let you in with your personal Gmail or Yahoo address. To sign up, you’ll need to use a business, domain-based email only.

They had to set such a barrier due to long-term abuse of their free packages. Sounds kinda fair, doesn’t it?

How to find email addresses yourself, without lookup tools

Email address finders are mighty, but they are by far not almighty.

People can hide their contact details so good that no email crawler will ever see a trace of them.

You can also run out of credits before you reach the bottom of your prospecting list. Can you wait for the end of the month, when your credits get renewed? I doubt it.

Here are a few ways to find email addresses without lookup tools.

1. Find emails in source code

When your email hunt is on, the first place to go should be your prospect’s site. But as I said earlier, contact and team pages don’t always reveal email addresses.

If your prospect is an author of some blog post, scroll down to its bio section.

Nothing?

Try to hover your mouse over their name or any other snippet that’s hyperlinked. Sometimes, email addresses appear in bios but you can’t see them with the naked eye.

Still nothing?

Then, you need to dig deeper into code. The question of how to find an email address in source code usually throws people into a panic. No worries, it’s easy even for non-techies like me.

Right-click somewhere on the page and select “View page source.”

Before you feel dizzy with what you see, click CTRL + F and type in mailto: or @domain.com. If there’s an email hidden in the page code, you should see it this way.

2. Find emails from websites via subscription

This trick isn’t for people fed up with too many promos coming their way. ‘Cause there’ll be even more…

A lot of online newsletters come from people’s business emails rather than generic addresses. No matter if it’s an individual blog or corporate site. So, I suggest that you subscribe to your prospect’s mailing list.

No luck?

Then, respond to a generic address like newsletter@domain.com, and you may hear back from a business email of someone on the team.

If you target a company offering a free product trial, sign up for it. Nine times out of ten, you’ll get a message from their head of marketing or sales rep.

With this trick, the number of promos will grow in your inbox but better focus on the bright side. Your response rates will grow too.

In business, people are more willing to reply to their leads rather than strangers who don’t give a damn about their products.

3. Guess email addresses based on common formats

Every time your tool returns nothing, you can try to guess an email address yourself.

Business emails are commonly based on formats that include your prospect’s domain and variations of their first and/or last names.

Here are the most popular email formats according to Hunter’s analysis of 12 million addresses.

Substitute your prospect’s details for the default values, as shown in the Example column, to come up with their possible emails. One of them should be valid.

To identify it, copy and paste them all into your Gmail address field. The one that shows a name or pic on hover should exist.

You can also check them one by one in Google using an exact-match search operator.

Unfortunately, it takes a while to create a lot of possible email addresses manually. With Email Permutator, you can skip such a monkey job.

Enter your prospect’s full name and domain, and it’ll generate many email variations automatically.

Example of business email address formats from Email Permutator

Next, you’ll need to check if they’re valid, though.

If you don’t even want to bother with that, install Name2Email in Chrome. This is a completely free email lookup extension.

It’ll generate possible emails right in your Gmail address field and highlight the valid one in green.

Example of company email address formats from Name2Email

4. Search Google for email addresses using advanced operators

Email finders mostly collect their data from the public web. That’s what you can do too.

To search for an email address on Google, use its advanced operators. Here are examples of how to use them specifically for an email search.

• [name] + email
• [name] + email address
• [name] + contact
• [name] + contact info
• [name] + contact me
• site:domain.com + [name] + email
• site:domain.com + [name] + email address
• site:domain.com + [name] + contact
• site:domain.com + [name] + contact info
• site:domain.com + [name] + contact me

Should there be anything out in public, Google will bring it to the surface.

5. Run a Twitter email search

In moments of desperation, when emails don’t show up anywhere, people request them on Twitter.

Go check if someone has asked such an awkward question for you and received the answer you need.

Here’s how.

Enter Twitter’s advanced search, add “email” or “contact” to the Words section and your prospect’s user name to the Accounts section.

People often try to hide their contact details from email crawlers. Instead of name@domain.com, they can share their addresses this way: name at domain dot com.

So, you can also specify “at” or “dot” in your search.

6. Perform a WHOIS email search when targeting website owners

WHOIS is a free service providing basic info about any domain, including its physical address and contact details.

Emails available there mostly belong to company owners. So, if your outreach request is meant for corporate blog editors, the service will be of no use to you.

Don’t bother CEOs, especially of bigger companies, with link requests. Most of the time, they have more important issues to handle.

Note that a WHOIS email lookup won’t always work for you. Some businesses share generic addresses there, while others hide them from public view.

7. How to ask for email addresses yourself

Tried all the tricks but still nothing? Unless your prospects live in a cave, there’s no way they don’t have an email.

You only have one option left… Ask yourself.

I know what you think: how can I ask someone for contact details when I’ve no idea how to contact them?

First, reach out to a generic email like info@domain.com or use their contact form.

Don’t disclose your offer right there. Simply ask about the best person to discuss it and how to get in touch with them.

As an alternative, you can request your prospect’s email on Twitter.

Better tag them with your question rather than send a private message. Speaking from experience, there’s usually so much spam in the Twitter inbox at the end of the day. Your request can easily get lost in it.

Final Word

Now that you know how to find email addresses, I hope for some responsibility on your part. Imagine that you and thousands of others sign up for email finders and spam the hell out of the same people.

The outcome?

Those people will insist that their contact details are deleted from email databases in no time. Please, don’t provoke them to go underground. It’ll end badly for all of us.

If you need some help with your outreach pitches, follow this detailed guide.

I can hardly imagine you couldn’t find someone’s email with so many tools and tricks. But still, if you couldn’t, let me know. I’ll try to figure out how to handle your specific case.