How to find someone's email address by name and company: tool, 5 methods, real cost

How to find someone's email address? You need two things: their full name and the domain of the company they work for. From there, you work out the email format the company uses, list the candidate addresses, and verify which one actually exists before you send anything. The generator below does the first half for free: type a name and a domain and it lists the eight candidate addresses, most common first. Further down, a free sample of 70 companies with their domain already resolved is yours to download.

The generator lists conventions; it does not find anyone. The rest of this guide covers how to get from those eight candidates to the one real address: five methods, what each costs, where each fails, and how to check the result before it reaches the person's inbox.

What you need before you look: a name, a company, a reason

Every method in this guide starts from the same three inputs. The full name, spelled the way the person spells it, with accents and hyphens: "Jean-Pierre" and "Jeanpierre" produce different addresses. The company, and ideally its domain, because the domain is what goes after the @. A company name is not enough when the company runs several domains or a brand name different from its legal one. A reason to write, because a work address is for work: you are looking for a professional contact to send a relevant message, not for a private inbox.

If you only have a company name, start by resolving its website: our guide on finding emails from a company website covers that step. If you have a LinkedIn profile URL rather than a name, the LinkedIn profile email guide is the better starting point.

How to find someone's email address: the 5 methods

The five methods go from free and slow to paid and fast. Most people try them in this order and stop at the first one that works.

Method 1: look at the source

Start where the person or the company publishes contact details themselves: the team or about page, the press page, the legal notice, a conference speaker page, a podcast guest page, a GitHub profile, or the signature of an email they already sent you. When you find the address this way, it is the most reliable result you will get, because the person chose to publish it. It is also the method that fails most often: the larger the company, the less likely individual addresses are listed.

Method 2: the domain plus the email format

Most companies build every address with the same convention: first.last, flast, first, and a few others. If you know one address at the company, for example from a press release, you know the convention for everyone, and the generator at the top of this page gives you the candidate for your person. The eight formats and how common each one is are detailed in our guide to company email addresses. The limit is simple: until you verify it, a candidate is a guess. Some companies mix formats, and two people with the same name at the same company get different addresses.

Method 3: Google search operators

Search engines index addresses published anywhere on the web. Combine the name and the domain in quotes, for example "Jane Doe" "@acme.com", or restrict the search to the company site with site:acme.com "Jane Doe". Try the variants with email or contact added. This works for people who publish: researchers, speakers, founders of small companies. For most employees, the search returns nothing, because their address has never been published.

Method 4: LinkedIn and social profiles

Some people show their email in the contact info section of their LinkedIn profile, in their bio on other networks, or in their posts ("write to me at..."). If you do not yet have the profile, find it first from the name and the company with a LinkedIn profile finder. Most profiles do not display an address, but the profile confirms the current company and role, which tells you which domain to use in method 2 or 5.

Method 5: an email finder by name and company

An email finder does methods 2 and 3 for you, across many sources, and returns the address it could verify. You give it a first name, a last name and a company domain; it returns an address or nothing. How a finder works under the hood, from pattern detection to server checks, is explained in our lead email finder guide.

With Derrick's Email Finder, the lookup costs 5 credits per email found, and nothing when no address is found. It is available on the paid plans, starting with Standard at 20 euros a month for 10,000 credits. The free plan's 100 credits a month cannot be spent on Email Finder: they serve to build and clean the list of names beforehand. You can run it on one name or a whole list in the Derrick web app, in the Google Sheets sidebar, from Claude or ChatGPT through the Derrick MCP, or from your own code with the API (MCP and API on the Plus plan and above).

Check the address before you send

Whatever method gave you the address, check it before the first email. An address that bounces costs more than one lost message: repeated bounces hurt your sender reputation, and the next emails land in spam for everyone. Three situations to know:

• Valid: the mail server confirms the mailbox exists. Send.
• Invalid: the mailbox does not exist. Do not send; go back to method 2 with another format, or to method 5.
• Catch-all: the server accepts every address at the domain, so it cannot confirm yours. Send carefully, in small volumes. Our guide on catch-all emails explains how to handle them.

Derrick's Email Verification costs 1 credit per email checked, on the paid plans. Addresses returned by Email Finder are already verified, so you only need it for addresses you found yourself with methods 1 to 4. More on the statuses in our guide to checking if an email is valid.

How to find someone's email address for free, and where it stops

Methods 1 to 4 cost nothing but time, and for one person they often work. They stop working in three situations, and it helps to recognize them early rather than spend an hour on a search that cannot succeed.

• Homonyms. Two people named Anna Martin at the same company cannot both be anna.martin@. One of them gets anna.martin2@ or amartin@, and no free method tells you which is yours.
• Mixed formats. A company that merged with another, or changed its convention over the years, runs several formats at once. Take an example: at a company with 300 staff, people who joined before a rebranding are first.last@, those who joined after are flast@. Knowing one colleague's address then tells you nothing reliable about your person.
• Catch-all domains. The server accepts every address, so even a free verification test says yes to all eight candidates.

When you hit one of these, a finder that crosses several sources is faster than any manual trick. For a single important contact, the time you save is worth more than 5 credits.

Finding the addresses for a whole list of names

For a list, the manual methods do not scale: at five to fifteen minutes per person, a hundred names take a full day or more. Put the names and domains in one list and run Email Finder on the whole column. For 100 names, you pay 5 credits per address actually found, so the most the list can cost is 100 times 5, or 500, and on the Standard plan's 10,000 monthly credits that is one list among several. Our guides on the bulk email finder and on company addresses across an account list cover the volume case in detail.

If you cannot find the address

Some addresses cannot be found: very small companies on a personal domain, people who left, freshly created addresses. Three alternatives work well:

1. Ask through another channel. A short LinkedIn message: "I would like to send you a two-page summary on [topic]. What is the best address for it?" Most people answer, because you asked instead of guessing.
2. Go through a general address. Write to the company's contact or sales address with the person's name in the subject line, and ask for it to be forwarded. Slower, but it reaches a human.
3. Call. A phone number often opens the conversation faster than an email you do not have. Derrick's Phone Finder costs 200 credits per number found, on the paid plans.

Four mistakes that cost you

• Sending to an unverified guess. Eight candidates means seven bounces if you try them all. Verify first.
• Deducing a format from one example. One colleague's address is a clue, not a rule, especially at a company that merged or renamed.
• Using a private address found somewhere. A personal address you stumbled on is not an invitation to prospect. Stick to the work address, for a work reason.
• Letting the address age. People change jobs. An address found six months ago is worth checking again before a new campaign.

How to find someone's email address from Claude or your own code

The same lookup runs where your work already happens. In Claude or ChatGPT, through the Derrick MCP, ask "find the email of Jane Doe at acme.com" and get the verified address, or a clear no, in the conversation. In your own tools, the Derrick API returns the address from a first name, a last name and a domain, so a CRM workflow or a Zapier, Make or n8n scenario can fill the field when a contact is created. MCP and API access come with the Plus plan and above, at 47.5 euros a month for 25,000 credits, with the same 5 credits per email found.