Visit each of those social media platforms—plus any others that you know or suspect the person uses—and search for them by name, age, school, company, hometown, or other information that you know about them. Even if the profile page isn’t public, sometimes people allow their email addresses to remain visible so that someone who isn’t a friend or follower can make contact. Use a large and extensive search engine like Google to garner the best results. Using any of the multitudes of advanced Google Search commands, you can try to narrow down the results. For example, putting a person’s name in quotes (for example, “Marietta Johansson”) refines the results to show only instances where both the first and last name are present. However, if the individual you’re looking for has a common name, like John Smith, you’re going to need additional information. If you know more about the person, such as their hometown and birth year, you could add those parameters to the search (for example, “Marietta Johansson Brooklyn 1992”). If that search returns too many results, you can add one or more domains that correspond with popular internet email services (for example, “Marietta Johansson Brooklyn 1992 gmail.com”). In some cases, you might have more luck searching for mailto, but doing so may cut down on the results, which might not help. For example, you might have luck finding an email address with Whitepages if you know the person’s name and location. Separate the individual’s first and last name with a period. If you look at a company’s email directory online and everyone’s email starts with their first initial and the first three letters of their last name, you can try this combination. For example, if the addresses on the company website are in the format firstinitial.lastname@company.com, John Smith’s would be j.smith@company.com. However, if you see on a company’s website that an employee named John Smith uses the address john.sm@company.com, it’s likely that all the other employees follow that same pattern. So, the email address for someone named Emma Osner would probably be emma.os@company.com. One example of such a tool is Email Extractor, a Google Chrome extension that runs in your browser to find email addresses on the page you’re viewing. Another is VoilaNorbert, which is free for the first few dozen successful searches. Enter a name and the website domain, and it will spit out any email address that matches those criteria. It works a lot like Hunter.
