Finding people
How to find someone's email address
To find someone's email address, check the places they chose to publish it first, then their company's pages, then ask a mutual contact, and use a contact tool when those fail.
By Invenitor team. Updated .
What should you do before you start looking?
Write down one sentence on why this person should hear from you. If you cannot write it, an email address will not help. This sounds soft, but it changes where you look. If you want a journalist to read your story, the right route is often their tips page. If you want a founder's advice, a mutual contact beats any address.
Next, decide how much the person matters. Spending half an hour on the one person who could change your year makes sense. Spending half an hour each on fifty people does not.
Where do people publish their own email?
Start with the places a person chose to share it. An address they published is one they expect mail on, and using it is polite. Check these in order:
- Their personal website. Look at the contact and about pages, and scroll to the footer.
- Their writing. Newsletters, blogs and articles often end with a contact line.
- Their talks and slides. Speakers often put an address on the last slide.
- Their social profiles. Read the bio and any link inside it. A link page often has an email button.
- Their company's team page. Smaller companies often list people with direct addresses.
- A press or media page, if you are writing about the company.
A simple search also helps. Try the person's name in quotes with the company name and the word "email" or "contact". If you know the company's domain, add it to the search. This finds pages where someone has listed an address openly.
What if the person never published one?
Ask someone who knows them. A short note to a mutual contact often gets you an address and an introduction at once, which is better than the address alone. Search your own network first, because this route has the highest chance of a reply.
If that fails, try the route the company offers. A contact form or a general inbox is slow, but it is often read by someone who can pass your note on. Write it so it can be forwarded: name the person, say why, and keep it to a few lines.
You can also reach out on a platform where the person is active and ask where to send a longer note. Keep it short. People respond well to being asked first.
When does a contact tool make sense?
A tool makes sense when you need more than a few people, when you do not know their names yet, or when your manual search has come up empty and the person still matters.
Tools differ in where they start. Some start from a company domain. Others start from a profile link. Invenitor starts from a sentence: you say who you need and see up to 100 people with role, company and links, then get the email or phone of those you pick. If you already have a profile, you can paste one LinkedIn or GitHub link instead.
On Invenitor a search is 20 credits (₹40), and it is free if it finds nobody. A contact is 1 credit (₹2), charged only when an email or phone comes back. New accounts get 25 free credits. Compare it with other tools on the pricing table, or see when doing it by hand is the better choice.
Should you guess an address from a pattern?
Many guides tell you to guess: first name dot last name at the company domain. It is a tempting shortcut, but it has three problems that those guides skip.
First, a wrong guess can reach a different person with a similar name, who now has your message. Second, a wrong guess that bounces counts against your sending reputation, and enough of them will send your real mail to spam. Third, a guess that does not bounce proves little, because some company mail systems accept everything. See catch-all address.
Invenitor does not guess addresses and does not run mailbox checks. If you try a pattern anyway, send one careful message and treat silence as no answer, not as proof.
What should you do once you have the address?
Having an address does not give you permission to use it however you like. Write to one person, say how you found them, and ask for something small. Rules differ by country and channel, so read the rules for contacting strangers if you plan to do this often.
Then read how to write a first email to a stranger. A good address with a poor message gets the same result as no address.
If you still have nothing after all of this, read what to do when no email is found. Sometimes the honest answer is to choose a different person, and that is often quicker than you expect.
Common questions
- Is it legal to look for someone's email address?
- Looking is usually not the issue. What you do with it is. Rules on sending marketing differ by country, so read the rules for your country and channel before you send.
- Can I find someone's email for free?
- Often, yes, if they have published it. Their site, articles and company pages cost nothing. A tool saves time when you need many people.