How to Spot the Email Address of Almost Any Person
This became a problem before and during INTA 2019.
I had a list of email addresses of contacts that I had set up years ago. I know that these contacts were INTA members at some time, but today they are no longer members.
INTA is a magnet for all IP people, and I knew that these people would attend the in-official INTA meetings across the street from the convention center, in the Westin Hotel lobby.
Most of the old email addresses did not work anymore.
I wanted to contact them, but how?
Make a Good Guess
In order to obtain my friend’s email addresses, I used a three-step process.
Step 1: make a good guess about their new email address
Step 2: send a polite email message
You can use a Step 2a by using an email live validator, such as https://email-checker.net/check or https://www.verifyemailaddress.org, and while doing so, stay incognito. However, this does sometimes not work.
How to Guess an Email Address
I am aware of a few simple methods for making good guesses of email addresses
Method 1: Use Email Lookup Services, such as Clearbit, which allows up to 100 searches per month for free. That is more than enough for me.
Email Lookup Services use an automated approach, by identifying most likely email patterns used.
Method 2: Make your own best guess for an email pattern.
Find out likely email domains from the person’s CV on LinkedIn. You can also try earlier employers, email addresses often remain in place after the person left the company.
Email addresses usually use one of the following simple formulas:
firstnamelastnameinitial@domain.com
firstnameinitiallastname@domain.com
The first name can be varied, e.g. by a nickname, such as “Jim” for “James”. Or “Steve” for “Steven”.
And then simply try it.
Please note that sometimes, special email addresses like newsletter@domainname.com, news@domainname.com or similar are used in newsletters. If you reply to these, an answer might come to you from the personal email address of that person. Many companies also have a general email address in their contact information (e.g. info@domainname.com).
Method 3: Use the email address stated in the respective person’s LinkedIn profile.
Method 4: Ask these people directly over social media, such as Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn
Now Here Comes Some Real Value for Email Spotters
I have found an expert’s article that lists a few more ways to find an email address, here
https://ahrefs.com/blog/find-email-address/
Archive this article in your Evernote app! It is ingenious.
Method 5: The article provides a shortcut for creating email permutations, using the Email Permutator+.
http://metricsparrow.com/toolkit/email-permutator/
The Email Permutator+ can automatically create a list of possible email addresses. Just fill in the fields and let it do the job.
Method 6: one more tool which will check the email suggestions: LinkedIn Sales Navigator Lite for Chrome (ex. Rapportive). Install it now if you have not yet. The LinkedIn Sales Navigator extension will reveal if this email address belongs to a LinkedIn profile (you must have a Linkedin account).
Method 7: one more tool which will check the email suggestions: click the “Compose” button in your Gmail and paste all the email permutations into the “To” field. Then move the cursor over the email address one by one and observe. Gmail will show you if the email address is associated with a Google+ account,
Method 8: search “@domainname.com” in Bing (and not in Chrome!)
Use exact match search for “@domainname.com,” and Bing will reveal email addresses related to this domain if they are publicly available.
Method 9: Twitter Advanced Search
Use the Twitter Advanced Search and look for “at” and “dot” words in tweets from your target person. You can also include words like email, contact or reach in your search to narrow down the results. Quite often people share their email addresses in their tweets. But to hide them from bots, they replace “.” and “@” symbols with “dot” and “at” words.
Method 10: subscribe to your target’s email list
Now this method is a bit sinister. Most newsletter emails will come from people’s personal email address, and so does my own newsletter. You usually can subscribe to an email list via an opt‐in form on the blog. Try it out on my own blog, here https://ip-lawyer-tools.com/category/free-articles/tipoftheweek/ This will give you my personal email address.
Method 11: Ask for a personal connection via a website contact form or a support chat on the company’s webpage. Often, they can connect you with the person you want to reach.
Method 12: check WHOIS data to see the email address of the owner of a domain. A lot of people will use their personal email addresses here.
How to Use the Above Information
Save your time and do NOT search for email addresses yourself.
Use my little article as a checklist and let it do by someone else.
Get a virtual assistant from the Philippines to do that. Their English language is good.
You can hire virtual assistants at online work platforms, here http://bit.ly/OnlineFreelance.
A typical price for a virtual assistant is 5 US$/hour, and very likely your work will be helping a single mother making a living.
Martin “Stay in Contact” Schweiger