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Find anyone's email

Eight methods, from free to paid: pattern guessing, GitHub commit mining, personal site scraping, and the finders worth paying for, plus how to verify before you hit send.

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Find anyone's email

Eight proven methods to find contact information for candidates and hiring managers. Ordered from easiest to most advanced.

01

Email Pattern Guessing

Most companies use predictable email formats. Try these patterns against the company domain:

  • first.last@company.com (most common)
  • firstlast@company.com
  • flast@company.com
  • first@company.com (startups)
  • first_last@company.com

Verify with email validation tools before sending.

02

Email Lookup Tools

Dedicated tools that find and verify professional email addresses:

  • Hunter.io — Domain search + email verification (50 free/mo)
  • RocketReach — Email + phone + social profiles
  • Lusha — Chrome extension, good for LinkedIn enrichment
  • Apollo.io — Free tier with email + phone + sequences
  • ContactOut — Built specifically for recruiters on LinkedIn
03

Google Search Tricks

Use Google operators to find emails hiding in plain sight:

  • "first last" "@company.com" — Direct email search
  • "first last" email contact — Personal sites
  • site:github.com "first last" @ — GitHub commit emails
  • "first last" filetype:pdf resume — Resume with email
  • site:twitter.com "first last" DM — Social contact
04

GitHub Commit Mining

Every git commit contains an email address. If someone has public repos:

  • Go to their repo → click any commit
  • Add .patch to the commit URL
  • The email appears in the "From:" header
  • Or use: github.com/[user].keys for SSH keys
  • Works even if they hide their email in profile settings
05

Conference & Event Bios

Speakers at tech conferences often list contact info in their bios:

  • Search conference speaker pages for the person's name
  • Check YouTube video descriptions for talk recordings
  • SlideShare/SpeakerDeck profiles often have emails
  • Meetup.com organizer profiles are public
  • Academic conference proceedings list author emails
06

Personal Sites & Blogs

Many engineers have personal websites with contact info:

  • Check their LinkedIn for website links
  • Search "first last" site:dev.to OR site:medium.com
  • Look for "about" or "contact" pages on personal domains
  • WHOIS lookup on personal domains (sometimes has email)
  • Substack newsletters list subscriber-reachable emails
07

Patent & Paper Databases

For senior researchers and inventors:

  • Google Patents — Inventor names link to corporate affiliations
  • Google Scholar — Author profiles often have institutional email
  • Semantic Scholar — AI research papers with author contacts
  • DBLP — Computer science bibliography with author pages
  • Research lab pages at universities list faculty emails publicly
08

Warm Channels & Social DMs

When email fails, go where they actually respond:

  • Twitter/X DMs — Many engineers have open DMs
  • Discord servers — Tech communities have DM access
  • Slack communities — Industry-specific groups
  • Reddit — Chat feature on relevant subreddits
  • Mutual connections — Ask for a warm intro (highest response rate)

Common questions

How do recruiters find email addresses for free?

Company email patterns (first.last@company.com covers a large share of companies), GitHub commit history for engineers, personal websites, and conference speaker pages all yield addresses at zero cost.

What is GitHub commit mining?

Every git commit carries its author's email. For engineers with public repositories, appending .patch to a commit URL reveals the address they actually use, which is often personal and long-lived.

Should I verify an email before sending?

Always. A bounce hurts your sender reputation and future deliverability. Use a verifier or send-time validation so invalid addresses never get mailed.

SourcingNav runs this playbook for you

Paste a job description and it builds the searches, scores every profile it finds, verifies emails, and drafts the outreach, with receipts for every score.

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More from the knowledge hub: Build Your Own ATS →Recruiting Automation with n8n, Make, and Zapier →