3 Tricks to Find Almost Anyone’s Email

Two wise prophets, Rockwell and his good friend Michael Jackson once sang, “I always feel like somebody’s watching me.”

They couldn’t have been more right.

Making a good first impression is super important when marketing and prospecting. Unfortunately in order to make a good impression, you need a soapbox to stand on to get a relationship started.

Whether you are a marketer trying to get a personal relationship somewhere, looking for a partner for content marketing, a business development ninja trying to woo someone into looking at your product or service, or just someone looking for job, this is a quick list of tricks to find almost anyone’s email.

Of course, if you don’t feel like wasting 10 minutes finding someone’s email, you should check out LeadIQ. They are a cool Chrome Extension that finds emails for you.

Technique #1: Use AllMyTweets.net

Twitter is a great place to meet people, but sometimes you don’t want a cold introduction to be on your public timeline. Rather than go into the limits of Direct Messaging vs. Email, let’s just focus on getting someone on Twitter’s email.

Many Twitter users at some point in their Twitter life have tweeted out something with their email addresses. Using a tool called AllMyTweets.net, you can check every tweet someone has ever made, and hunt for an email address.

Here’s how’s it done:

1. Go to AllMyTweets.net
2. Type in your target’s Twitter handle.
3. When the results come in, use CTRL+F (or EDIT → FIND if you hate using shortcuts shortcuts) and search for the term “email.”
4. Go through the different tweets mentioning keyword “email” , and you are more than likely to find a tweet with an email address.

Technique #2: Guessing via Email Formula

Years ago, when I was doing Business Development at Dyn, I use to just try and guess someone’s email knowing their first name, last name, and domain. If you feel lucky and want to it this way, just skip to Step 2b. If you want to do something more formulaic, start on Step 1.

Step 1: Huge shoutout to Rob Ousbey, COO at Distilled Media who built this document that allows you to put in a person’s first name, last name, and company domain. Once you input those three items, it spits back some magical results that would make Rockwell write another hit, giving you a list of most usual email formats companies use:

So now you have a list of many emails, but no way to confirm the correct one, right?

There are two options for Step 2 that can help you figure out which email address to use.

Step 2a: Take the potential email addresses and use Rapportive

You probably know about Rapportive already, but if you don’t, go install it.

Rapportive is a great gmail plugin that let’s you see if there is any Linkedin account associated with an email address. Linkedin actually owns Rapportive.

Copy and paste all the emails from step 1 into a composed message’s “To” input in gmail like this:

Now click on each potential email addresses one by one, wait a few seconds for Rapportive to check it’s data, and if your target has an email associated with his or her’s Linkedin, Rapportive will populate their social information on the right as you toggle their email.

Step 2b: Use MailTester.com

MailTester.com may be one of the most under utilized tools online, but it also depends on how your target’s mail servers are setup. Take one of the emails from step 1, and go to MailTester.com.

MailTester will take an email address you have, and tell you if it exist on that company’s mail server. Sometimes, mail servers block verification, but I’d say 75% of time, you’ll be able to find a valid email address.

MailTester will color code your checked email addresses as your put them in one by one.

• If it responds with yellow, it means verification is blocked. You are out of luck.
• If it shoots back red, the email address doesn’t exist.
• If it gives you green, crank up the Rockwell because you found their email!

Technique #3: Do a Whois look up on a target’s personal website.

In the internet world, in order to have domain registered somewhere, you must have contact info associated with that domain, and that info needs to be public. Did you find your target’s personal website, but they don’t have contact info? Or what if it is a smalls startup, and they are the founder?

Unless they use a whois protection service (a proxy that deals with their email, as Dyn calls it, “secret registration”), often times you can do a whois look up to find their info.

Here’s how:

1. Go to whois look up site. I recommend Whois.com.

2. Type in your target’s domain. Make sure you leave out the “http://” part.

3. Look at the result, and you should be able to find an email address if the target doesn’t use whois protection. Here’s an example of what the results should look like:

In conclusion, these techniques can’t guarantee you’ll find a target’s email all the time, but most of the time they should help you more than Michael Jackson helped Rockwell get a Top 40 hit.

For more hints like this, follow LeadIQ

Please note: It’s very important for everyone to remember to make a good first impression and make your target feel special. If you are going to email them, send them something that shows you care. Don’t use this to spam people. It doesn’t work, and we simply don’t like it.

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