EmailKing7 Ways to Find Anyone's Email Address (Manual to Automated)
Every outreach effort starts the same way: with the other person's email address. LinkedIn DMs get ignored and contact forms rarely reach the actual decision maker. The good news is that most business emails exist somewhere on the public web — the question is how to find them fast and accurately. Here are seven methods, from manual to automated.
1–3. Manual: website pages, search operators, pattern guessing
① Check the company's Contact, About and Team pages first — more of them list emails than you'd expect. ② Google search operators ("name" + company + "@companydomain") surface addresses exposed in public docs and press kits. ③ You can infer the company's email pattern (first.last@, f.last@) from other employees' addresses and construct a guess. All three are free, but each takes minutes per contact — and guessed addresses must be verified before sending.
4–5. Social: LinkedIn, GitHub and personal sites
LinkedIn's contact info section, a developer's GitHub profile and commit log, and the about page of personal blogs often carry an email. Founders and indie hackers in particular tend to publish hello@ addresses on their personal domains.
6. Email finder databases
Tools like Hunter.io and Apollo search a pre-built database by name and domain. Fast, but they can miss companies that aren't in it — small firms, new startups, local businesses — and stored data goes stale over time. Both have free tiers; paid plans start around $34–49 a month (Hunter.io Starter: $34/mo billed annually or $49 monthly; Apollo Basic: $49 per user/mo billed annually — prices checked Sep 2026).
7. Live web extraction — straight from pages you choose
The most direct method is to take the address the company publishes on its website right now. EmailKing reads the page you give it, live, decodes obfuscated addresses (mailto links, [at] spellings, Cloudflare email protection and the like), and checks the site's contact/about/team pages if the main page shows none. Each address gets a syntax check, a DNS MX lookup and a label showing whether it matches the site's domain. Bulk mode (Starter and up) takes up to 10,000 URLs per session with CSV/TXT export — effectively automating method 1 at list scale. The free plan (25 URLs a month) is enough to try it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I email an address as soon as I find it?
Check two things first: ① the address is verified (protects your bounce rate), and ② you comply with the recipient country's law — US CAN-SPAM is opt-out; the EU needs a lawful basis such as legitimate interest; Canada, South Korea and some EU countries require prior consent for marketing email. See the legal guide for details.
How accurate are pattern-guessed addresses?
Good when the company uses a standard pattern — but you can't know without verification. Always run guesses through a verifier, and separate catch-all domains into their own list.
Is collecting emails from websites legal?
It depends on the country. South Korea bans collecting email addresses from a website with automated tools without the site operator's consent. Under the EU GDPR, a published work address is still personal data, so you need a lawful basis and must tell the person where you got it. In the US, sending commercial email to addresses harvested by automated means from a site that says it won't share them is an aggravated CAN-SPAM violation. Check the rules for both collecting and using addresses where your recipients are (this isn't legal advice).
For a deeper dive, see the Complete Cold Email Guide, Part 1.
Next Steps
Every outreach motion starts with a clean lead list. EmailKing pulls the emails a website publishes and checks each one's syntax and mail server (MX) on the spot — the free plan (25 URLs/mo) is enough to start today.