How to Find Someone's Email: 11 Methods That Work (2026)

Start with public sources: the company website's contact, about, and team pages, the prospect's LinkedIn contact info section, and their personal website or social bios. Free finder tool tiers (Hunter, Apollo, Clearbit Connect) give you a small number of monthly searches at no cost. Combine these with a free email permutator and a free verification tool to confirm the address. Most B2B addresses can be found this way without paid software.

Hunter and Apollo both report verified-address accuracy above 90% for B2B contacts at companies with 50 or more employees. Accuracy drops for very small companies, very new domains, and prospects in non-tech industries. The most reliable workflow is to use a finder tool to get a candidate address, then verify it with a separate verification tool before sending. No single tool replaces the verification step.

Generally no, and you should not try. Personal addresses are not public business contact information, and emailing them for cold outreach falls outside the legal exceptions that cover B2B addresses under CAN-SPAM, GDPR, and CASL. Stick to professional addresses at the company domain. If a prospect lists a personal address publicly on their own website or social profiles, that is a different situation, but cold-emailing personal Gmails sourced from data leaks or scrapes is both legally risky and

In most jurisdictions, yes, when done correctly. CAN-SPAM (US) permits cold email to business addresses with proper sender identification, a physical address, and an unsubscribe link. GDPR (EU) permits B2B cold outreach under the legitimate interest basis with documentation and easy opt-out. CASL (Canada) is stricter and typically requires either consent or a publicly published address. This is informational, not legal advice; consult a qualified attorney for your specific situation.

An email permutator generates the most common email address patterns for a given name and company domain. For example, for Selin Arslan at Portlio, a permutator outputs selin.arslan@portlio.com, sarslan@portlio.com, selin@portlio.com, and roughly nine other variations. You then run the list through a verification tool, and the pattern that returns "valid" is the live address. Permutators are the standard fallback when finder tools return no result.

Use a verification tool such as NeverBounce, ZeroBounce, Bouncer, or Kickbox. The tool checks email syntax, looks up the domain's MX records to confirm live mail servers, and pings the SMTP server to confirm the mailbox exists. Results return as Valid, Risky, or Invalid. Send only to Valid addresses, handle Risky (often catch-all) addresses with extra caution, and exclude Invalid addresses. Verification costs roughly $0.001 to $0.008 per check.