I just found an email for someone I wanted to contact. I'd asked for some help from the person who wanted me to contact the man. She had been unable to find his email.
I found it in about 30 seconds.
1- In this case, I plugged in the man's name on google. That's a habit I'm trying to break. Actually, checking Bing, the results were fairly similar, but the details on the man's background were more extensive, without having to click anywhere. But then, when I did a search for his email: (Name University name email) I couldn't find the university page for him on Bing. Even just typing in his name and email pulled it up right away on google but not on Bing.
I'm doing some basic digging and here are some other strategies on how to find someone's email address:
2- Find out universities or companies the person is associated with. Then add that to the search words:
[Name] [university] contact
[Name] [university] email
[Name] [company] contact
[Name] [company] email
3- Use google's advance search function to find content within a specific website. I use this tool just about every day for one reason or another.
Type:
site:websitename.com + name + email
or
site:websitename.com + name + contact
That may help. I use that same advanced function to look for articles and the like on a specific site. It's very handy.
4- If my initial search doesn't find a university or organization associated with the person, I'll often go to Twitter to see if the person has a website in his bio. Or you can search for @[name]. If Twitter doesn't pan out, I'll also try Facebook. Sometimes wikipedia will help.
5- If the person is a published author, sometimes I'll contact a publicist or marketing person at his most recent publisher. They're often very helpful at either providing an email or forwarding my email on.
6- I will often check my email records. Frankly, mine are a true monstrosity, since I've been on gmail for over ten years. I have over 430,000 emails to search through. With so many-- about 500-700 a day coming in that make it through the spam filters, I sometimes miss an email completely and a search turns up ones I never opened, sometimes related to the search and sometimes not. But sometimes I also find the email of the person I'm looking for.
Ken Lyons, at wordstream blog offers some very handy additional approaches.
7- do a search at linkedin.com or zoominfo
name +linkedin or name +zoominfo
8- do a Whois search at networksolutions for the person's blog or website (after you've found the site/blog.) That will show you the contact info of the person who owns the website. Sometimes it's the person you're looking for and sometimes it's the website coder who helped set it up.
9- @message the person on twitter and ask them to follow you so you can DM direct message them to get their email.
10- Wikihow suggests you try a few other online directories:
11- Both Lyons and Wikihow suggest you try to make up a likely address, such as joeblow@company.com, Joe.blow@company.com or j.blow@university.edu or similar variants. Try a bunch of different possibilities.
12- You can also just make a phone call to the company or department where the person is employed.
What strategies do YOU use to make email finding magic?
