An entrepreneurs guide to finding someone’s email address

“There! Gotcha, I found your email!”

It may not be as cool as the old detective movies, but let’s face it, finding people’s emails is probably the closest most of us will ever get to being a real detective. As an entrepreneur you are constantly trying to get in contact with people, but you don’t want to waste a lot of time looking for contact information.

Coming up is my personal goto methods for finding email addresses so find a hat and get ready for some real detective work.

Melville’s Le samouraï

#1 Whois?

Opening up is the “hacker” method: Doing a whois lookup on domain names for personal websites to trace registrant email. This may sound a bit scary but is actually really easy to do. It requires that you have access to a Unix shell, which basically means that you’re either on a mac or linux system. Here are the steps:

1. Find the personal webpage of the person you’re after and copy the domain name (url).
2. Open the “Terminal” app.
3. Type in: “whois <domain name>” (without “http://”)
4. Click enter and you will get a response similar to the example below. You will find the email under the “Registrant Email” field.

This works because people usually use their own email to register a domain name for their personal site.

#2 Emailhunter

Email Hunter - Find email addresses in seconds

Just a great resource for finding company emails. Emailhunter is a site that basically crawls the web looking for text in the following format: “<something>@<company domain name>”.

I often use this in cross reference with LinkedIn to find people in specific positions. For instance, If I’m looking for the Lord Business at Octan Corporation, I simply do a company search on LinkedIn and find the name of the person. Turns out Lord Business was his actual name, but the example is still valid. The last step would be to do a emailhunter search for “octancorporation.evil” to find all company emails and then just look for something like “lord@octancorporation.evil” or “lord.steven.business@octancorporation.evil”.

#3 Wayback machine

This is perhaps the most clever one I have up my sleeves. The method basically leverages the fact that 1) most small websites have a “about site” with email addresses, and 2) every website ever has once been small.

Internet Archive: Wayback Machine

Wayback machine is a really awesome project that takes regular snapshots of most websites. This means that you can browse back in time and visit old sites to be nostalgic or just have a laugh:

Facebook somewhere around 2005.

So the idea is to go as far back as to the point where the website in question was pretty immature. Then you can usually find your prospects email on a “about page” or even in the footer.

To give you an example, here’s how you could find the email of Medium CEO, Ev Williams. (email is no longer in use so don’t get your hopes up)

@ev ‘s personal website from back in 1998.

#4 Guessing

I know, this is a lame one. It’s not exactly detective science, but it can be effective with the right approach. I recommend trying the following combos with the company domain name of the person you’re looking for:

1. barack@ (first)
2. obama@ (last)
3. barack.obama@ (both)
4. bo@ (initials)
5. potus@ (twitter)
6. b-bag@ (shortname)
7. purple@ (favorite color)

Also, don’t just send out shittons of emails to random addresses. Yes, google might punish you, but more importantly, there are easier ways of verifying your guesses. Personally i prefer: https://tools.verifyemailaddress.io/

#5 Twitter and Github handle

The last one is also pretty boring. Just two websites where email addresses frequently surfaces. It turns out that most people that are highly active on Twitter often has posted their email address at some point. To do a quick search, simply use Twitters advanced search.

Twitter Advanced Search

With the advanced search you just type in the handle of the person you want and search for keywords such as “gmail” or “mail”.

For developers though, I find Github to be the number one goto place for finding emails. Just do a user search on their site and you’re maybe 60% sure of finding your prospects address. When it comes to sharing stuff like this, dev’s are usually pretty good.

Build software better, together

Thats it. Hope you’ve picked up some new tricks and feel free to comment if there is something I’ve missed.

Stay ninja.