How to Find Someone's Email Address: 10 Free Ways (2026)

You can find almost anyone's business email address in a couple of minutes — usually for free.

I spent almost a year building an email finder tool, so I've learnt a thing or two about finding email addresses.

Note: I'm the founder of Emailchaser, so I'm biased — but everything below is fact-based, and most of the methods don't use my tool at all.

The fastest way to find someone's email address is to enter their name and company website into a free email finder — it checks email formats, public sources and deliverability for you in seconds. When that fails, the other methods below cover everything else.

Here are 10 free ways to find someone's email address (plus one paid bonus method for finding emails in bulk):

1. Use a free email finder tool
2. Generate guesses with an email permutator (then verify)
3. Find the company's email format
4. Use Google search operators
5. Check LinkedIn and social media profiles
6. Check their company website
7. Check data breaches
8. Ask AI (but verify everything)
9. Use reverse email lookup (find someone by email)
10. Ask through their website's contact form
Bonus: Export emails in bulk from LinkedIn Sales Navigator

Note: These methods find business email addresses. They are not designed to find personal email addresses.

Here is every method at a glance:

Method	What you need	Free tool
1. Email finder tool	Name + company domain	Email Finder
2. Email permutator + verifier	Name + company domain	Email Permutator + Email Verifier
3. Company email format	Company domain	Company Email Format Finder
4. Google search operators	Name + company domain	Google (free)
5. LinkedIn & social profiles	Their profile	LinkedIn / X (free)
6. Company website	Their website	None needed
7. Data breaches	A guessed address	HaveIBeenPwned (free)
8. AI search	Name + company	ChatGPT / Perplexity (always verify)
9. Reverse email lookup	Their email address	Reverse Email Lookup
10. Contact form	Their website	None needed
Bonus: Sales Navigator export	Sales Navigator ($119.99/mo, or ~$89.99/mo billed annually, as of July 2026)	Lead Finder extension

1. Use a free email finder tool

The fastest way to find someone's email address is to enter their first name, last name and company website into an email finder tool.

You can try Emailchaser's Email Finder for free. Since Emailchaser is also a full cold email software, you can email the leads you find from the same tool.

Email finder tools are the best method because they automate most of the other methods in this article — checking common email formats, public web sources, social signals and deliverability — so you don't have to do each step manually.

Not all email finder tools are created equal, though. In our 100-person test, Emailchaser's Email Finder found 88% of emails vs Hunter's 67% — roughly 21% more — because it can find non-public emails rather than only scraping addresses already published on the web.

You can see how the major tools compare in my article 6 Best Email Finder Tools (Ranked By Accuracy).

2. Generate guesses with an email permutator (then verify)

Most business email addresses follow one of a handful of formats, such as firstname@domain.com, firstname.lastname@domain.com or f.lastname@domain.com.

That means you can generate every likely combination of someone's name and company domain with a free Email Permutator, then test which one is real with a free Email Verifier.

The verifier checks each guess against the mail server without sending anything, so you'll know which address is deliverable before you write a word.

One caveat: some domains are "catch-all", meaning the server accepts mail for any address. If the verifier flags a catch-all result, treat the guess as unconfirmed and cross-check it with one of the other methods below.

A quick manual trick: paste your best guesses into the "To" field in Gmail. If an address is tied to a Google account, Gmail will often show the person's profile picture. It doesn't always work, but it takes seconds.

3. Find the company's email format

If you know which format a company uses, you only need to test one guess instead of thirty.

Enter the company's domain into the free Company Email Format Finder to see the most likely pattern (e.g. first.last@company.com), then apply it to the person's name.

You can also work the format out yourself: find any one employee's email address publicly (a press contact, a blog author, a conference speaker list) and you almost certainly have the pattern for everyone else at that company.

4. Use Google search operators

Google can surface email addresses that are published anywhere on the indexed web — you just have to ask it precisely.

Try these searches:

• "firstname lastname" "@company.com" — finds pages containing the name near any address at that domain
• site:company.com "firstname lastname" email — searches only the company's own site
• "firstname.lastname@company.com" — an exact-match check on a permutator guess
• "firstname lastname" "@company.com" filetype:pdf — PDFs (whitepapers, event programs) often contain contact details that normal pages don't

Always click through and confirm the address actually appears on the page — snippets can be stale.

Tip: DuckDuckGo treats the "@" symbol more literally than Google, so repeating the same searches there sometimes returns results Google filters out.

This method only works for publicly indexed addresses; the finder and permutator methods above can find emails that were never published anywhere.

5. Check LinkedIn and social media profiles

Some people simply publish their email address on their social profiles — it takes ten seconds to check.

• LinkedIn: open their profile and click "Contact info". Some people list an email there (more often for first-degree connections). Also skim their About section.
• X (formerly Twitter): check the bio, and search their tweets for "email", "reach me" or "@" — people often share contact details in disguised formats like "name [at] company [dot] com".
• Instagram: business profiles can show a public "Email" contact button.

There's also a confirmation trick: most social networks' signup forms tell you if an email address is already associated with an existing account. If your guessed address is "already in use", it's a real, active address.

6. Check their company website

Company websites leak email addresses in predictable places.

Check the contact page, the about/team page, blog author bios, the press/media page and job listings — hiring managers and PR contacts frequently list direct addresses.

If the person is a software developer, there's a lesser-known trick: on GitHub, open one of their commits and add .patch to the end of the commit URL. The raw patch file shows a "From:" line that often contains the email address they commit with.

7. Check data breaches

The site HaveIBeenPwned.com tells you whether an email address has appeared in any known data breach.

This doesn't discover new addresses — but it's a strong way to confirm a guess. If a permutator guess shows up in a breach, that address definitely existed, because it couldn't be in a breach otherwise.

It's possible the address is no longer active, but most people keep the same work email for years, so a breach match usually means the address is still live. Pair it with an email verification check to be sure.

8. Ask AI (but verify everything)

AI tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity can search the public web and sometimes surface someone's published email address faster than manual Googling.

Honest warning: in my experience a meaningful share of AI-returned emails are outdated, mis-formatted or outright invented. AI can only see what's public, and it will confidently guess when it doesn't know.

Treat every AI-sourced address as a lead, not an answer — run it through a free Email Verifier before you ever hit send. Sending to bad addresses causes bounces, and bounces damage your sender reputation.

9. Use reverse email lookup (find someone by email)

Sometimes you have the opposite problem: you already have an email address, and you need to find the person behind it.

That's a reverse email lookup. Paste the address into Emailchaser's free Reverse Email Lookup and it analyzes the address structure, identifies the likely name and company domain, and generates Google and LinkedIn searches to confirm who owns it.

It's also useful in the forward direction: once one of the methods above produces an address, a reverse lookup helps you confirm the email actually belongs to the person you think it does — before you send anything.

10. Ask through their website's contact form

The last free option: email the company through its contact page and ask them to forward your message to the relevant person.

This is a last resort, but it works more often than you'd expect — if your message is relevant and concise. A rambling pitch won't get forwarded; a short, specific note often will.

I recommend reading my article How To Write A Cold Email (6-Step Process) — the same principles that get cold emails answered get contact-form messages forwarded.

Bonus: Export emails in bulk from LinkedIn Sales Navigator

Everything above finds one email at a time. If you need hundreds or thousands of emails, use Emailchaser's Lead Finder Chrome extension to export leads with their emails from LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

Sales Navigator is the best source of accurate B2B lead data, but LinkedIn doesn't show you anyone's email — so you filter your exact audience there, and the Lead Finder extension extracts the leads with their email addresses, thousands per day.

This is the one method in this article that isn't free: Sales Navigator costs $119.99/mo, or ~$89.99/mo billed annually (as of July 2026 — see my full LinkedIn Sales Navigator vs Premium cost breakdown). If you're doing outbound sales at any real volume, it pays for itself quickly.

Exported leads can be double-verified (two independent verification providers must both approve an address before Emailchaser emails it — verification credits are a small extra cost), which keeps bounce rates under 1%. You can see how this fits into a full outbound workflow on the pricing page — the Starter plan is $1 for the first month.

Frequently asked questions

Final thoughts

If you need one person's email address, start with the free Email Finder — it automates most of the other methods in this list. If it can't find the address, work down the list: permutator + verifier, company format, Google operators, social profiles.

If you have an email and need the person, use the free Reverse Email Lookup.

And if you need thousands of emails for outbound sales, use the Lead Finder extension with LinkedIn Sales Navigator, then send your campaigns with Emailchaser's cold email software — finding, verifying and emailing leads all happens in one tool.

Related reading: 6 Best Email Finder Tools and Best Cold Email Software.