To find someone’s email address.
Ideal Outcome:
You have one or more email addresses that belong to that person.
Please consult your local regulations regarding email communications before sending cold email outreach campaigns.
Being able to reach the right person at the right time will increase your chances of success no matter what your proposal is.
On any web browser (ideally Chrome)
Every time you want to find someone’s email address.
The person responsible for lead lookup in your business.
Use Twitter
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Search for the person’s Username+Email
💡 Tip: Too many tweets show up and you want to filter them out to show only the most relevant ones?
Use (email) (from:[Twitter Handle]) instead.
Example:
3. Use Twitter’s password reset feature to get a hint of how that person’s email address looks like:
💡 Tip: 9 times out of 10, if the email ends in @g****.*** it stands for @gmail.com. Same for @o******.*** standing for @outlook.com.
⚠️ Note: Do not actually request a password reset or you will let the other person know someone is trying to reset their password.
Use Instagram
Use Instagram’s password reset feature to get a hint of how that person’s email address looks like:
Verify if your email address is deliverable
Use https://tools.verifyemailaddress.io/ to verify the email addresses that you believe belong to the person you are looking for.
Check the Results table to see the likelihood of that being a real email. If your result is ‘Bad’ it probably isn’t a real email:
Find a personal website
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Search on Google for “First name + Last Name”
💡 Tip: If you can’t find it on Google try FirstNameLastName.com. (I.e. SimoAhava.com)
If you found a personal website but it is not available anymore, then try using https://archive.org/web/ to recover those pages.
You just need to enter the website that you want to recover, and then pick a date in the past to see how the website looked back then.
And a backed up version of the website will be brought up:
💡 Tip: You can usually use Wayback Machine on twitter profiles as well:
Example:
When you have found a personal website, look for a contact page.
If one doesn’t exist try the Terms and Conditions and the Privacy Policy page. Sometimes you will find an email address there and it’s the owner’s address (or forwards it to the owner).
If you still can’t find it you can try Googling these advanced search operators:
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site:[URL here] (at)
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site:[URL here] [at]
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site:[URL here] email
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site:[URL here] contact
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Find related websites
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Use this tool to find sites that share the same server with your original site.
⚠️Note: 9 times out of 10, the fact that they share the same server doesn’t mean that they belong to the same owner. Use common sense to check if any of the websites in the list are likely related to that same person or not. If there is a strong relation, chances are that they do belong to the same person.
Use this tool to find sites that share the same Google Analytics or Google Adsense accounts.
Grab the Google Analytics code from the original website by installing Google Tag Assistant for Chrome. Click on the plugin on any website and it will let you know if Google Analytics is running on that website and what the ID is.
2. Query it in DomainStats
Check the results. The list of websites that is retrieved has a very high likelihood of belonging to the same owner.
Use Lead Finding Services
Check https://hunter.io/ if you know the company where that person works by entering the company’s website and then scrolling through the available emails
💡 Tip: If you create a free account you will be able to see their email immediately:
If you can’t find the person on Hunter.io, check https://rocketreach.co/ , you can search using different criterias:
Perform a Reverse Image Search
If you have pictures of the person (from Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc), you can perform a reverse image search on the 3 main image search engines: Google, Bing and TinEye.
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Perform a reverse image search on Google by dragging and dropping it to Google’s Search bar → Clicking on “All Sizes” → You’ll find a list of pages where that same image also appears.
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Perform a reverse image search on Bing by dragging and dropping it to Bing’s Search bar → Clicking on “Pages with this” → You’ll find a list of pages where that same image also appears.
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Perform a reverse image search on TinEye by dragging and dropping it to TinEye’s Search section → You’ll find a list of pages where that same image also appears.
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Go through the list of websites you found and try to find contact information on them.
Use Google
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Use the following search operators on Google to find websites that might have the contact information of the person you’re looking for:
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“[First Name][Last Name]” “email”
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“[First Name][Last Name]” “contact”
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“[First Name][Last Name]” “gmail.com”
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“[First Name][Last Name]” “CV”
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“[First Name][Last Name]” “Curriculum Vitae”
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Subscribe to their email list
If you find a website that belongs to them that has an email newsletter, subscribe to it.
In the welcome email (or the next emails) check the sender of the email, sometimes it’s sent by that person’s professional email.
Guess it
If you’re looking for a professional email address, you might be able to guess it by inferring from other people that work at the same company. Use Hunter.io as you did in a previous chapter but this time look for the “Most common pattern” field.
Once you have the common pattern you can use that to guess the correct email address.
If you haven’t had luck with it, try firstname.lastname@gmail.com , since it’s the most common format, this is not ideal though since you might be sending to a different person.
Confirm if the inbox exists by verifying that the email address is deliverable.