Eight Ways to Guess and Verify Email Addresses

Suppose you are determined to find someone’s email address. With the new LinkedIn InMail policy, some say, this may happen in their practice more often. The post below outlines top eight ways to figure that email address out,starting with a list of guesses.

Before we go there: as the creator of one of the most popular email-finding techniques Rob Ousbey says,

With great power, comes great responsibility.

Let’s keep that in mind! (Don’t spam anyone.)

To find someone’s email address, you can try to come up with a number of guesses, using “email permutators”, known email formats for employers, and, perhaps, your imagination. For larger companies, try this custom search engine to find company email formats.

Note #1: Researching company email formats deserves a separate blog post; I am not covering it here in any detail.

Note #2: The eight verification techniques listed below can work with whole lists of guesses. Verifying just one or two email addresses can be done in some additional ways; that would be the subject of yet another blog post (coming soon).

Once you have a list of email address guesses, here are the eight ways to try and pinpoint the correct address. These eight methods all work in different ways, so if you are not successful with one, you can try another and you may succeed. Each of the 8 ways is quick to try; all are free except the last one.

1. Find emails with Rapportive (by Rob Ousbey). LinkedIn recently changed Rapportive , so this technique is less powerful now: it won’t cross-reference against any Social Networks, other than LinkedIn, any longer. But the technique still works, by finding the LinkedIn profile registered with the correct address, if the profile exists.
2. Find Almost Anybody’s Email Address with #LinkedIn: this, actually, works differently from Rob’s technique. This is dynamic cross-referencing; Rapportive provides cross-referencing against stored information, which can, in some cases, be incomplete or outdated. It’s pretty reliable and provides up-to-date information.
3. Find Almost Anyone’s Email Using MS Outlook: this technique will check email address guesses against LinkedIn, Facebook, and possibly XING, depending on your Outlook version.
4. Uploading a list of emails to Gmail will identify those with Google-plus accounts. Unfortunately, this is not 100% reliable in our experience, meaning, it may miss the correct profile even if it exists; it’s still worth a try, of course.
5. The post Find People on Google-Plus by Emails  has a few more relevant hints.
6. Uploading a list of emails to Gmail will let you to cross-reference them on Twitter. This will not work with large lists, as our experience shows, but will work just fine with a few dozen email guesses.
7. You can verify a list of email guesses against Facebook. This option is not easy to find! On the page Invite Your Friends locate the link “Import your email addresses” and point to a text file with a list of emails. No worries, you can use it without inviting anyone. Cancel all the invites – and see which email address is right. Note that if you work with a larger volume of addresses to verify (say, for several people at once) and wanted to look at the imported list in detail, the page Manage Contacts is not that helpful, but exporting your Facebook data would be. In the exported data you will clearly see the addresses which have and have not been identified as belonging to members. (I guess there’s another blog post this can be expanded into.) The downside to exporting is that you can’t select only some data to download, so you’ll have to get a complete archive.
8. Finally, tools like Mailtester.com provide free email checking for one address at a time. They “ping” email servers without sending an actual email. We know that they only work with some email servers. Checking email lists using that technique is offered by a good number of vendors for a price; I have not used that, so my comments will be minimal. Aaron Lintz has pointed me to this site as a good one.

Thanks to irina for Great Post....

Passive Search Tool

Just check out my new Passive Search Tool.

www.passivesearch.in

Find Almost Anyone’s Email Using MS Outlook

Find Almost Anyone’s Email Using MS Outlook

In the following post I am going to explain how to easily and quickly test all of the guesses for a person’s email address all at once using MS Outlook.

MS Outlook has an add-on called Social Connector. I have Outlook 2013 and the Social Connector is built in; for this latest version you need to turn it on. For earlier Outlook versions you need to add it which is easily done.

You can then connect Outlook with your LinkedIn and Facebook accounts and (depending on the version) with other social sites. I was able to add XING to my Outlook.

Here’s How to Find Almost Anyone’s Email Address.

The example below is for a “sample” person with the common name David Smith who works at Microsoft.

I am starting off by generating a list of guesses for the email address (or, perhaps, several email addresses) for the person. As a sample list of guesses I am trying variations of the email using @microsoft.com and several free email provider extensions such as gmail, yahoo, hotmail, and aol.

Note: These email guesses I am using are not “optimal” for a case like this; you are on your own to set a list of guesses. Ideas and templates are welcome; please share. What I am going to explain is how to test the guesses out all at once.

Step 1. Create a list of guesses for the email address and save in a csv file: 

Step 2. Import into Outlook pointing to these values in the file to be imported as email addresses:

Step 3. Here is what the list look like after importing. You can see the email addresses that have been identified on each of the networks!

The identified LinkedIn profiles stand out, having a little blue “in” on the pictures.

Your being connected with the people with the given addresses doesn’t affect the identification; it always works; or let’s say, it works the same for everyone.

Have you read the post up to here?  Here are a couple of notes on relevant previous blog posts that you may have thought of.

1) Correct, you know how to find email addresses using Rapportive. It’s explained in the great post Find (Almost) Anybody’s Email Address | Distilled along with an excel table that helps to generate a list of guesses for the email addresses at  bit.ly/name2email.

The above way is different. It’s better in some cases – and faster- because:

- it looks the email addresses up vs. looking up in the acquired data (as Rapportive does). This is more up-to-date, which can make a difference in better identification of the email address.

- it shows the whole list at once; you can have a list as long as you wish. If the list is long, you just scroll the list, there’s no need to mouse over every address. This is much faster.

If someone is not on LinkedIn and not on Facebook, but is identified by Rapportive, the referenced post would work better; if you are really after an email address, try both!

2) Great! You have read my most popular to-date post  

 it will also find people who are on other social sites, most importantly, Facebook.

Thanks for reading. Enjoy!

Thanks to Irina Shamaeva for great Idea!