How do you find an email by name?

So, you know exactly who you want to talk to and where they work—great! All that’s left is to find their email by name. How do you do that? Well, keep reading, because, as usual, we’ve got you covered.

1. Check their website before you do anything fancy.

Back to absolute basics! Many professional or organisational websites will have a list of personnel on their website with their contact details.

If they don’t have a staff contact page, they might still have the right email address somewhere on the site. Use the website’s search function to check any places where the target contact’s name comes up for email details.

Some websites don’t offer a search function, or their search function isn’t very effective. In those cases, you can always use Google’s site search. If you head over to www.google.com and plug site:www.websitename.com in the search field, the search engine will search just that site, instead of the whole web.

2. Social media, professional bodies and networking sites

Statista tells us that 4.59 billion people were on social media in 2022. There are 8 billion people in the whole world, so that’s a lot of social media users. The chances of the contact you’re seeking having an account somewhere are pretty good!

With a little work you might be able to find it. Some social media platforms are more likely to contain professional contact information than others, and knowing a little about social media demographics can help you figure out where to look. For example, TikTok has a vanishingly small contingent of over 40s, and the bulk of its users are under 24 and female. More than half of the audience on Twitter, on the other hand, is between 25 and 49 and male.

Specific professions might have their own places on the internet, too. Professional registers and peak bodies will often allow you to email their members using a search function by name, and there might be other little-considered websites to poke around on, too. For example, if the contact whose information you’re seeking has been published in an academic journal, you can check out ORCID or see if they have a Google Scholar profile—these won’t contain an email address themselves, usually, but they will provide you with more information and context to inform your search, like work history, website links, or institutional information.

3. Google it

No, no, come back, wait, come back. I promise this will be useful.

Listen, everyone knows the amazing secret “type name into Google” technique. But there are other things you can do with Google search that you might not know about yet.

A Google search is less likely to provide you with the same degree of context as other methods, but it’s pretty likely to return you something—it’s just a matter of asking it the right questions, in the right ways, to narrow and define your search parameters.

Boolean search operators work with Google (and many, many other databases), and they’re invaluable to help you get the results you need. Here are some examples:

• Enclosing your search term in quotation marks will give you results using that exact phrase, so if you plug in “Samantha Dean” you will not get any results for that pesky Samantha Maree Dean—just the exact phrase you searched for.
• The asterisk is a wildcard operator. Using one will return variations on the word you typed. For example, searching Australia* will bring back results including Australia, Australian, Australians and Australiana.
• Enclosing search operators in parentheses works just the same as it did in grade 6 mathematics: you can use it to specify the order of operations. The operator in the parentheses is always applied first. Use this when combining multiple clauses to make sure they go in the order you need them to.

There’s an excellent resource for how to use Boolean search operators available here, and Google’s Refine Web Searches cheat sheet has a wealth of other handy search hacks over here.

4. Permutation and validation

This is the brute force approach, and it’s a little laborious. When you’re searching for someone’s email, you might be looking for their whole first name and surname, but you might also be looking for different permutations of their name. For example, renowned consultant Jessica Atkins might have the [email protected], but she might also be jatkins, jessica-a, or atkinsj. There are a lot of possible variations.

An email permutator can help you find as many of the common permutations of an address as you could ever possibly want. Metric Sparrow’s Email Permutator+ (which is free, easy to use and requires no new downloads) is a great example of such a tool.

These don’t verify that the emails they’re giving you are correct: they’re just generating possibilities. They can be useful, if that’s what you’re looking for. If you want to verify whether or not any of those emails are real emails you can contact, you’ll need a tool for that as well. These could be something simple and manual like Email-Checker.net, or something more powerful, accurate and complex—there are a variety of options at different price points.

5. Call them and ask

The most straightforward of these options, but not usually the most likely to succeed—still, the old tactics persist for a reason, and there’s something to be said for making a direct, straightforward and personal enquiry.

Calling the main line of your target organisation and just requesting your contact’s email address can have surprisingly good results, provided you can convince whoever answers that phone that you should be given the information you’re asking for.

6. Use MarketBase+

It would be gauche of us to insist—but you are on our website.