Knock knock, it’s a new message in your inbox. Who is it from? A future business partner, a high-performing employee candidate, or a potential client? Or maybe it’s just a scammer who wants to steal your personal details (or money)?
Ooh… Could be anything…
That’s why it’s better to have a couple of useful tools on hand to protect yourself from scam and fraud, just in case.
You already have half of the job done — you have an email address! And with its help, you can find some personal information such as the email address owner’s name, the websites they mentioned their email on, and even their physical address and phone number.
Want to know how? We’ve compiled a list of the best reverse email lookup tools and methods so you can find the one that will bring you the best results.
Outline:
What is a reverse email lookup?
A reverse email lookup is a process of searching for information about a person or entity using their email address. It’s like having a virtual detective at your fingertips!
So, what kind of information can you expect to find? A reverse email lookup can provide you with:
- a person’s full name
- current address
- phone numbers, both mobile and landline
- all social media profiles (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.)
- photos, etc.
What is reverse email search used for?
Reverse email lookup can be useful for many purposes – both personal and business. Let’s discover some of them.
Purpose #1. It can protect you from phishing attacks
The average email user receives 16 (!) malicious emails every month. Cybercriminals resort to credit card fraud, identity theft, and ransomware attacks. Replying to phishing emails can undermine the security of your personal data and the data of the company you are a part of!
With a reverse email lookup, you can quickly and easily identify fake email addresses and potential fraudsters. By entering the email address into the tool, you can see if it matches the name and contact information of the supposed sender, which helps you avoid emails from fake or fraudulent sources.
Purpose #2. It saves your email marketing reputation
It’s better to carry out a check to send emails to valid, promising leads. Otherwise, you risk damaging the reputation of your email domain, and your lead-generation goals will backfire.
A reverse email lookup helps you check information about leads, so you can be sure you’re sending emails to the right people, who won’t mark your emails as spam or never show any sign of engagement.
Purpose #3. It helps you prospect effectively
Having an email address is just the beginning of your marketing efforts. To reach out to the right leads at the right time, you need to know your audience better.
A reverse email lookup provides more information about your potential leads or customers, empowering your prospecting efforts. This can help you segment your audience for more targeted marketing campaigns.
Purpose #4. It helps hire the right people
If you’re a recruiter, a reverse email lookup can provide additional information about potential candidates. This can help you quickly and accurately assess a candidate’s qualifications and experience and make more informed decisions about who to contact for an interview.
What is more, not every candidate is honest with recruiters and company representatives. So, if you don’t check the accuracy of the information, you could end up hiring someone who will do more harm than good to your business.
Note! If you don’t need detailed research about the sender but simply want to check the contact for validity, then you can use Email Verifier from Snov.io. In a matter of seconds, you can verify email addresses that raise doubts and clear your contact list of unpromising leads. In addition, checking if emails are valid with Email Verifier will help you save your IP address reputation, which can be damaged by a high bounce rate.
If, apart from the contact validity, you also want to find out more information about them (real name, nicknames, phone numbers, etc.), then read on!
Top reverse email lookup options and tools
We’ve done our research and asked business experts to share their experiences with reverse email lookup. Having received about 20 responses, we compiled a list of the 6 best ways to find data through an email address. The most popular among these is using special tools.
#1. Reverse email lookup with the help of special websites and tools (free and paid)
CocoFinder
CocoFinder is a public record search service company that provides a range of features with an easy-to-use interface.
Using its Email Lookup tool, you can find data such as the sender’s first and last name, nickname, social media profiles (Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn), full current address, phone numbers, photos, etc.
CocoFinder is currently one of the most popular tools for reverse email lookup. Most replies we received advised using it as a go-to reverse email lookup tool. Here’s what Harriet Chan, the company’s co-founder, says about its benefits:
I use CocoFinder to know more about my customers, which helps better personalize their experiences. Moreover, doing a background check on my clients and leads allows me to identify more people in their online circle to benefit my products.
As for lead generation, using this tool helped Harriet attract 10% more clients at this point of the year than she did the entire year in 2020.
Besides, with CocoFinder, you can gather data about potential business partners. The team of John Ross, CEO of Test Prep Insight, gets several emails per week from random companies asking to partner with them. And it’s necessary to parse out scammers from legitimate prospective partners. Here’s where CocoFinder comes to the rescue:
The advantage of CocoFinder is that it is super accurate and works well for our purposes. The downside though is that it can be a little pricey. It is not the cheapest tool on the internet, but given that the alternative is doing extensive Google research ourselves or paying for a cut-rate service, I think it’s worth the price.
Other available lookup options: By name, address, phone numbers.
How to use it: Go to the website and then scroll down a bit to find the tool you need.
After that, enter your target person’s email address, click the Start Search button, and CocoFinder will provide you with a report in a few minutes.
If there’s no data available regarding your search, you will be offered to try out other background check services, such as Trustfinder, Instant Checkmate, BeenVerified, Intelius, and Peoplefinders. By the way, some of them will be mentioned on our list too.
Price: Basic features like phone search are available free of cost, but if you need advanced information on your target, you need to pay a fee. The more data you need, the higher the price.
Social Catfish
Social Catfish is an online investigation service that verifies data to confirm if the person you’ve received an email from is really who they say they are.
Get the following information: phone numbers, social profiles (Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, etc.), addresses, usernames, age, images, aliases, and more!
With this service you can:
- Check if a scammer is writing to you or not.
- Get real info about your business partners and leads.
- Find not only a contact number but also a photo of the person you are interested in.
Other available lookup options: By name, address, phone number, username, and images.
How to use it: Register on socialcatfish.com, choose the best paid plan for you and then use the service tools. Enter the email of the person who has sent you the email and start the search.
Or, start the search first and then unlock your report by subscribing to the service.
Price: $5,75 for 5 days, then $27,47 per month.
EmailSherlock
Just like other tools on this list, EmailSherlock helps determine the identity of the owner of an unknown email address that shows up in your inbox.
Here’s the information you can get by running a reverse email search: the sender’s name, phone, location, public records, photos and videos, web results (Google, Bing, Yahoo, web archive results, publications, news), etc.
Caroline Lee, the co-founder of CocoSign, loves using this tool because it lets you know who the scammer is, their real identity, any negative history records, etc. As for the shortcomings, Caroline underlines that, sometimes, this reverse email lookup tool provides inaccurate results:
And I would like to add that this is another tool that doesn’t give full information and instead sends users to the BeenVerified website for a detailed paid report. Wouldn’t it be easier to go straight to BeenVerified in the first place?
Still, it can be quite useful.
How to use it: Enter an email address and click on the Search button. As a result, you’ll get a report that will contain profiles associated with the email, including profiles on Gravatar, Facebook, Flickr, etc. (if any!). This is how you can get the name of the person emailing you. I found our Editor’s Gravatar profile just like that:
To get advanced data like the phone number, address, or web results, you need to go to BeenVerified (you’ll be automatically redirected there) and restart the search process.
Price. Free.
InfoTracer
With InfoTracer, you can find the sender’s name, address history, phone numbers, social profiles, web accounts, images & videos, personal assets, data breaches, online activity, public records, education, and employment information.
Reuben Yonatan, the founder & CEO of GetVoIP, uses this tool about once a week. As he says:
I get so many marketing emails — some are services I could use, but I like to know more about the sender/salesperson before I take that first step. Infotracer is very detailed and low-cost. It’s also faster than the other tools I’ve used.
Other search options: By name, phone number, username, address, plate number, IP address.
How to use it: Enter the email of the person who has sent you an email, start the search, and then unlock your report by subscribing to the service.
Price: Unlimited search access will cost you $3.95 for 7 days, then $19.05 per month will be charged.
Instant Checkmate
Instant Checkmate is a public record search service that enables you to check information online about people you are interested in, your potential customers, business partners, or future employees.
What can an email search reveal? Name, photos, previous jobs, possible addresses, other known email addresses, possible usernames on websites, Gravatar profile, social media profiles (Facebook, Pinterest, Linkedin), etc.
Other lookup options: By phone number, name, location.
How to use it: To use the reverse email lookup feature, you need to have an account on their website. The tricky part is that to sign up, you need to run a name check first and subscribe to the service, so it’s quite inconvenient. 🤔
Once your account is created, the procedure is the same: enter an email address in the search field on your dashboard and get a report.
Price. $2 for a 5-day trial, $35.12 per month for 1 month of unlimited reports, $28.09 per month for 3 months of unlimited reports.
BeenVerified
Here it comes! BeenVerified has already been mentioned a few times when describing other tools on our list. Users from the most popular reverse search websites CocoFinder and EmailSherlock are often redirected to it.
Its reverse email lookup feature goes beyond search engines, crawling through billions of public records to let users find the data they need — aliases, phone numbers, alternative email addresses, social media profiles, education, and work experience information.
The reports of this tool may also contain court records on possible criminal and civil cases.
Other options for this service: By phone, address, username, vehicle, unclaimed money.
How to use it: You can sign up and choose the paid plan that suits you best. After that, you can safely use the tool without restrictions.
Or, you can also get a report by entering an email of the person you are interested in and conducting a search. You will then be asked to pay for the trial period. That’s all!
Price. $1-5 for the 7-day trial period, $26.89 for a 1-month membership, $17.48 per month for a 3-month membership.
You can also check out some other tools: Intelius, ThatsThem, Spokeo, TruthFinder.
SEON
Another way to do a reverse email lookup is by using browser extensions, for instance, SEON Intelligence Tool. With it, you can reverse-search an email address to get the data you need, namely first/last name, social media accounts, and more.
Key features: Integration with fraud prevention tools, precise risk scores.
The founder & CEO of Online Degree Grant Aldrich is pleased with all the tool’s capabilities, though he highlighted just one drawback:
The only downside is that it’s slightly pricier than other similar tools, but I’ve found the depth of information they provide isn’t as good as with SEON.
Other available search options: phone analysis module, IP analysis module.
How to use it: If you aren’t ready to commit to SEON, try it out for free first. Sign up for the 14-day trial and enjoy using the tool. You can perform the checks manually, via API, or with a Google Chrome extension.
Price: From €300 per month (up to 4,000 checks) to €1000 per month (up to 15,000 checks). A 14-day free trial provides up to 1,000 checks.
Yeah, a bit pricey! But the quality is worth it.
#2. Reverse email search on Google
This search option is fast and absolutely free. Just enter an email into the Google search.The search engine will extract and disclose all the data about the account of your interest found online.
There’s a high likelihood you will find what you are looking for since many people register on various websites, forums, or other platforms. You won’t pay a dime and still get a lot of relevant information.
Google can show you the social media accounts of the contact who sent you the email, where you’ll find out more personal details about a person.
But unfortunately, such a search might not always give you the desired results. In some cases, you may waste your time, say, if the person you are looking for has not linked their email address to any social media account.
#3. Email reverse lookup by the domain name
If the sender’s email address uses a business domain name, you can go to namecheap.com, who.is, or mxtoolbox.com, search the domain of the email and get more information about its owner.
These websites will provide you with publicly available data, such as domain registrar, status, expiration date, and DNS servers. The disadvantage of this method is that the domain’s owner could buy this domain and give it to their team for use, and as a result, you may not get what you are looking for.
How to use it: To start the search, enter a domain or IP address.
Price: Free.
By the way, whois.whoisxmlapi can show even more results. You just need to enter the sender’s email (not the domain). Here, the services are paid and available after registration, but the possibilities are much wider. You can find the name and physical location of the registrant, the creation and expiration dates, the last update of the domain, as well as check the validity of the email address.
Besides, with this tool, you can do a bulk reverse email search. To use who.is services you need to register, and you will immediately receive 500 credits for free (1 request = 1 credit).
Price: From $30 (1,000 credits per month) to $3,600 (2,5000,000 credits per month).
Still haven’t found the option that suits you best? Let’s continue!
#4. Reverse email search using Facebook and other social networks
This one is simple! Just copy and paste the email address of the person you want to find into the Facebook search box and click the Search button. If the sender has made their email public on Facebook, their name will appear in the results. There, you can easily check the sender’s photos and basic information.
However, this method has one drawback. Since Facebook’s privacy settings allow you to prevent users from seeing your email address, you might not get a result.
If you can’t find your sender’s personal information on Facebook, use other social networks like LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter. You will likely find some data on at least one of them.
#5. Reverse email lookup using email clients
Use email clients that automatically present reports about senders, for example, Polymail for macOS or MailBird for Windows.
They are perfect for tasks such as retrieving and displaying the sender’s data. You don’t have to go anywhere to do complex research since all the necessary information is there. Still, I like Polymail more because it’s more informative than MailBird.
Price: Polymail costs from $13 per month (per user) to $59 per month (per user). MailBird costs from €1.69 per month (billed annually, unlimited accounts) to €82.25 (one-time payment, unlimited accounts).
Wrapping up
That’s all for now! You’ve got a huge list of tools and methods that will help you achieve your goals — whether it’s identifying fake email addresses and potential fraud in time or searching for data about leads and candidates for employment. As you can see, there are paid and free options, with different functionality, so choose boldly according to your needs and the needs of your company.
Good luck!
