How to Find Someone’s Email (Absolutely for Free)

Use Name2Email extension for educated guessing

Let’s start with the easiest, most accurate tactic to search email by name using a handy Chrome extension we built a few years ago.

1. Install the Name2Email extension using direct link or go to the Chrome Webstore in your browser and search for Name2Email manually.
2. Go to your Gmail account in a new tab and click “Compose” to open the New Message window. In the Recipients field, enter the person’s name and surname. Add the  @ symbol and the prospect’s company domain address. Your resulting input should look like this: FirstName Last Name @ Website.com
3. Once you’re done, the extension will automatically start generating the possible email address options based on the common email patterns and then verify on the go. The valid ones will be highlighted in green. Here’s how it works:

If at this stage you see at least one option highlighted in green (which happens in most cases), congrats! Your research is finished and you don’t need to read this guide further :)

In case you didn’t get any valid email options at this stage, try hovering over the generated emails one by one. If the address is linked to an active Google account, you’ll see your target’s profile:

But don’t get discouraged if you can’t find your prospect’s email using Name2Email. There are plenty of other best free email lookup hacks. Let’s move on to the hack #2.

Use Findy for Effortless Email Discovery on LinkedIn & Outreach

Now, let’s move on to another super easy way to find emails and streamline your outreach: Findy. It’s a Chrome extension that lets you discover verified prospect emails directly on LinkedIn. It also syncs this data with Reply, allowing you to automate your sales outreach seamlessly.

Imagine you’re browsing your favorite professional social media site (it’s LinkedIn, no doubts), checking out potential leads.

You find a few promising profiles and open the Findy extension. As you explore these profiles, Findy automatically searches for their email addresses. Signing up is a breeze with your Google account, just a couple of clicks, and you’re in.

All the contacts Findy discovers are added to your Reply trial account. You can then choose to save these contacts to a list in Reply or directly push them to an outreach sequence.

Plus, when you’re using Gmail, Salesforce, or HubSpot, opening the Findy extension on any contact profile or a page with multiple contacts syncs the data effortlessly with your Reply account.

If Findy doesn’t find the emails you need (almost impossible), no worries! We’ll cover a few more effective ways to find emails next, just in case.

Double-check the variants with Clearbit Connect

Clearbit Connect is another handy extension (aka Gmail finder) that works right in your Gmail and is free to use (though with certain limits). It  is also a handy addition to the Name2Email tactic to find email leads described above.

1. Install the Clearbit Connect extension using direct link or look it up on the Chrome Webstore manually.
2. Once you’re ready, check the email address variants you’ve generated using Name2Email one by one using the Clearbit Connect Sidebar. If a corporate email is valid, Clearbit will show all the information about that contact.

Pro tip: Clearbit Connect only offers 100 searches per month for free, so use it wisely. You can earn an additional 10 credits/month for each of your contacts who installs the extension.

Just Google it!

Googling an email might seem like a crazy and time-consuming idea, but believe me it works just fine (as long as you need to find just one high-priority contact, not thousands of them). 

Here are the common tactics you can use:

1. Use the query format “{FirstName} {LastName} @{Website}” – for example, “William Oleksiienko @reply.io”

2. If that doesn’t work, try a simpler option: {FirstName} @{Website} – e.g., “William @reply.io”

3. If you know the company’s email pattern (and it’s different from the common patterns), try searching other variants of that query as well:

4. Other helpful search queries that you can use are ““{FirstName} {LastName}” +email or “{FirstName} {LastName}” +contact.

Pro tips:

• Use quotation marks to search for an exact phrase.

• Search the website for specific keywords using the “site:” query, e.g., site:reply.io William.

• To get only the results that feature a given word (email or contact), use +, e.g., William Oleksiienko +email.
• Another handy search hack is to use * symbol which will return all pages containing variations of the searched word.

Get creative with the prospect’s name

Having found tens of thousands of emails manually, I’ve noticed that some people use different forms of their first name for their corporate email address.

For example: Thomas → Tom, Matthew → Matt, Alexandr → Alex, Nicholas → Nick, Jonathan → Jo, Elizabeth → Liz.

So, when you search for a first name that can have a few variants, try searching for all of them using the previous scenarios, including Name2Email and Google search.

Pro tips:

• This approach works both ways: Will → William, William → Will
• Search Google for all possible name variants first because there are some names that may have 2+ alternate forms.

Try the “double name trick”

Sometimes people also have 2 given names, for example, William John Oleksiienko. In this case, use the following tactics:

1. Try searching for the person’s email address with Name2Email using only the first name, e.g., William Oleksiienko @reply.io
2. Try searching for the person’s email address with Name2Email using only the middle name, e.g., John Oleksiienko @reply.io

Pro tip: Some people might also have prepositions between their first name and  last name, e.g., van, van der, etc. Usually, they don’t use these prepositions in their email addresses, but you can try searching for both options.

Play around with the company’s website address

If you still can’t find the required email address, doublecheck the company’s website and make sure there aren’t any alternatives or website redirects. 

For example, reply.io has previously been replyapp.io, so some of our contacts might be still using the old domain for their email boxes. Some companies would also use secondary domains to create practically unlimited email accounts for outreach purposes.

Take hktteleservices.com for example. When you check their contact us page, you notice that they still use the old domain for email addresses: info@pccwteleservices.com.

Another example here is ibexglobal.com (redirects to ibex.co).

Pro tip: The easiest way to check if they have alternative domains is to look up their corporate-wide inboxes like, hello@, support@, team@, help@, info@, etc.

Search on Twitter

If the person you’re targeting is active on Twitter, there might be a chance that they have already shared their contact data with someone. You can check this using the Advanced Search feature. With a couple dozen filters, you can fine-tune your query to get exactly what is needed for free.

I recommend targeting the prospect’s profile (“From these accounts” filter) and use @domain.com, email, contact as the query under “Any of these words.”

With this simple hack – and some luck – you will be able to find someone by email for free.

Export data from LinkedIn

Did you know that all the data from your LinkedIn profile belongs to you? That includes all the contacts in your network! And the best part is that you can download an archive with all your contacts’ info, including the associated email addresses.

Note: This only works if the target prospect is already in your contacts list on LinkedIn and you want to reach them via email. So you will need to connect with the person first.

Here’s a simple workflow to get prospect email from LinkedIn:

1. Find the target prospect on LinkedIn and send a connect.
2. Go to your LinkedIn Settings -> Data Privacy or follow this link.
3. Choose the kind of info you want to export (in this case, the Connections).

The archive with the requested data will be sent to your email (which might take a few minutes).

Turn to Google Spreadsheets

Google Spreadsheets can offer loads of features to the pro users who are ready to get their hands dirty with some basic coding. I’ve explained how to automate email lookup in Google Spreadsheets in a previous blog post. All you need is an email finder tool that offers a comprehensive and easy to use API.

If finding someone’s email address seems too complex, you can still use Google Sheets to optimize the list management process. Here’s just a couple of tips that might be helpful in this regard:

• Use Google Spreadsheet as a faster way to manage a bigger list of prospects. If you need to find just 5-10 contacts, you can just use your Gmail Account
• Use =CONCATENATE Function to speed up the process of generating the Input format: e.g., FirstName LastName @company.com

Ask for referral

If you’ve tried all the available options but still couldn’t find the right person’s email address, there’s one last hack you should try. While conducting your research, you might have come across a few other contacts from the target company – even if it’s a general address like sales@ or support@. So why not ask to be pointed in the right direction?

If you make sure to properly communicate your request and the person on the other end of the line’s kind enough, you will not just get the desired email address, but also will be able to use the person as a reference, increasing your chances of success with the outreach. 

This tactic works especially well when you contact a person in a lower level role as you’re trying to reach the senior manager.

Pro tip: Aside from asking for the right contact via email, you can also try to reach the target account via social media. An SMM person might not give you the top manager’s email address right away, but with the right approach you can expect to smooth your way up to the decision-makers.