The first result for this query reveals Russ’ email address
Clicking on the first search result leads you right to his email address – doesn’t get much easier than that. A similar approach to this, but using AllmyTweets.net, is presented by Emma Still in this post. These are all very effective at finding a reliable email address.
7. Google Searches
I did warn you that this was the least pretty of them all, right? Ok, good. Searching Google for email addresses is all about brute force and persistence. You just need to search as many combinations of the name, domain name, and other keywords in hopes of finding the proverbial needle in a haystack. Here are some of the combinations that you might add to your repertoire:
- “@example.com” (to find if it was put anywhere out on the web)
- at example dot com (helps to identify those that wrote their address in a way that spammers couldn’t scrape it)
- Example.com privacy policy email (searches any privacy policy pages for the mention of an email address)
- Examples.com terms of use email (searches a Terms page for any email address mentions)
- Jim Smootherz email (if the person has a unique name, such as in this example, try searching it along with ’email’)
- Jim Smootherz example dot com
- jim Smootherz @example.com
8. Rapportive Hack
Rapportive is an amazing tool that provides rich information about people you are communicating with right in your inbox. If you don’t have it installed yet, stop reading and grab it right now.
Rob Ousbey did such a great job building out a framework to use for email discovery, that you should really read his post for the full tactic. In short, what you do is create a number of possible email addresses using a spreadsheet, and then test each of those in your Rapportive-enhanced inbox. Once you’ve entered in a working email address, Rapportive populates with social media data, indicating that you’ve got a live one.
If you are dealing with a company, a great tool to help you identify what email address domain they use is email-format.com. For example, I worked at Sallie Mae years ago, and at that time we used @slma.com for our email addresses even though our site was salliemae.com. If you used @salliemae.com, the email wouldn’t have worked. Email-Format.com would let you know that even though the domain is salliemae.com, the email address format was slma.com.
Here is a walkthrough of the strategy from Rob:
9. MailTester.com
Let’s say Rapportive doesn’t turn anything up for you, perhaps because they haven’t registered any social profiles with their email address. Well, you don’t have to stop there. You can try all of those email combinations from the step above in MailTester.com, which can help you determine if the email address is valid or not by running a check against the domain’s mail server. It doesn’t work every time as some servers have this feature disabled, but as you can see from the screenshot below, when it works, it works!
