Reverse Email Lookup: How To Do It in 2024 (Free Methods & Tools)

Today, where communication often occurs online, getting more to know about the person or entity associated with an email address can provide users with a heightened sense of security, trust, and transparency.

Reverse email lookup can act as a catalyst for your endeavor to get details more about that real face from an email address. Let’s see how we can find out the real identity by just an email address.

What exactly is a Reverse Email Lookup?

It is the process of extracting details about a person or entity using his/her email address from public databases and search engines. Typically, a reverse email lookup can give you the following data points about an individual:

1. Complete Name
2. Social Media Profiles
3. Contact Details such as Phone Number
4. Job Position
5. Location

It’s essential for businesses looking for legitimate customers to verify the identity of the person behind the email address to protect themselves from potential fraud in the future.

Why Use Reverse Email Lookup?

According to a study conducted, there will be 4.37 billion email users in 2023 worldwide, sending approximately 347.3 billion emails per day. And this is going to increase and reach 4.48 billion by the end of 2024.

But the question is, are all these emails legit?

Is the email received from a legitimate entity, or is a spammer trying to scam with a planned phishing attack?

In this case, we are left with only two choices. First, we might ignore the received email, assuming it holds no importance for us.

However, there might be some chance that you received a legitimate email to offer you a job in his company, or it might be your potential customer whom you have contacted using email marketing.

To verify the person’s identity in such cases, one can conduct a reverse lookup email to gather detailed information about that person.

Reverse Lookup Email also safeguards companies’ email domain reputation by providing detailed information based on the leads. This data helps verify if emails are sent to the right people.

How does Reverse Email Search work?

Reverse Email Search is a technique that involves utilizing the information available in the databases and publicly available sources of information like search engines, online repositories, and other relevant websites. A reverse email tool will always check for the appropriate material from these sources before returning anything.

These online databases and search engine results might include the name, job position, and working location of the email owner. This data is matched and tested thoroughly to ensure accuracy.

Use Case Scenarios for Reverse Email Lookup

We now are well versed with the knowledge of the process that reverse email lookups do. Understanding its use cases can help us grasp more about this particular topic.

1. Identifying scammers/fraud email – Knowing who is behind an email is a sure-shot way to know a person. However, there will be cases where the emails you put into the reverse lookup system and you don’t get any data. What can you infer from this situation?
   Chances are the email has been built for the sole purpose of scamming/fraud. If an email address has no records found on the web or public databases, there are chances that the email is built to be used in fraudulent activity.
2. Helps in Tailored Outreach – Suppose you have data of emails for your software business, knowing who the person is and where he works can help you build a tailored outreach for that particular person. Therefore for all the other email addresses you have, this might help you to convert visitors that landed on your website but didn’t convert to pay.
3. Improves Lead to Account Matching – Many times it happens that you have the email addresses of multiple people from the same company under your system and you don’t know to which company they belong. Reversing emails can help you bypass this problem and match every individual entity to the company they work in.

8 Free Reverse Email Lookup Methods

There are numerous ways in which one can gain deep insights into the identity of the person. Some approaches can be executed on a large scale, while others may involve complex methods that are too time-consuming & involve manual work.

1. Search Engine Results
2. Google Sheet
3. LinkedIn Search
4. Using Facebook
5. Who.is Public Database
6. Using DomainIq.com
7. Using Outlook
8. Reverse Contact Email Tool

Let’s discuss each one of them in detail.

Using Search Engines for Reverse Email Lookup

Search Engines like Google or Bing can be used to verify the identity of the email owner. You simply input the email into their search bar, and their algorithm will come up with the most relevant information associated with the email.

In the above image, as you can see, I entered an email in Google Search Bar, and it returned the matching LinkedIn profile. From the results, we can gather job positions, location, and the link to the LinkedIn profile. But not every email address can be reversed by this process, sometimes the search engines won’t show any LinkedIn profile or anything for that matter. In that case, we can continue with other methods mentioned in this blog.

2. Using Google Sheets

We can also check the real face behind an email if it is registered to a Google Account by Google Sheets. To accomplish this task, open Google Sheets in your browser, then enter the email into any random row of your choice.

When you hover over the email, you will get a card displayed on the screen with the profile photo of the owner’s email confirming the authenticity and existence of the ID. In some cases, it also presents the complete name of the person. You can try this by entering any random email to confirm.

In this case, we have already his complete name — Sebastian Baier

As you can see from the above GIF, we found the LinkedIn and other social IDs of this person, providing valuable insights into his profile. This information can be utilized to engage with him on relevant platforms for business purposes.

3. LinkedIn for Reverse Email Lookup

LinkedIn is the biggest professional and employee-focused platform, boasting more than 950 million users worldwide. It is one of the favorite platforms for data miners seeking to enrich the records of any person, company, or employee. It is also one of the most effective tools for reverse email lookup.

Let’s check how we can perform a reverse email lookup using the LinkedIn search bar.

So, we found the person we were looking for as the first result. However, what if we did not know him before? We need to verify if the person belongs to the same company we are looking for.

Open Google in your browser and type the company name in the search bar using these Google search operators — site:linkedin.com/company “buynomics”.

Now, we are certain that the company we seek is also recognized as Buynomics on LinkedIn.

To refine these LinkedIn search bar results further, you can apply a Current Company filter. This is especially helpful if there are multiple individuals with the same name, ensuring that the selected person is indeed the intended individual.

After clicking on the “Show Results” button, you will have only the result that corresponds to the actual person you are searching for.

4. Facebook For Reverse Email Lookup

Facebook launched in 2004, back in that time it was one of a kind of social platform. Although not guaranteed, there’s still a good chance of easily finding individuals on Facebook today.

You can start the procedure by entering the email address into the search bar of Facebook. However, if the corresponding email you searched for is not one of your mutual friends, Facebook will not show it if that account is private. Any public account will be shown by the platform.

Then, you can filter the results to separate the most relevant ones. It is worth mentioning that Facebook is only suitable for reverse searching personal emails rather than professional ones.

5. Using Who.is Public Database

Who.is is one of the trusted domain checkers to verify any email sender’s domain. They show detailed information about the domain, such as registration date, expiration, nameservers, DNS configurations, and registrar info.

Here is an example of enrichmentapi.io in Who.is lookup.

These tools provide particularly useful information for validating the legitimacy of email’s sender domain, especially when dealing with illegitimate senders.

6. Using DomainIq.com

Domainq.com provides a powerful set of tools for domain name research. Offering various domain-related details, including ownership info, and DNS details. It can also help discover associated domains and gather information related to domain registration and hosting.

Other reputable providers such as ICANN and DNSLytics also offer similar functionalities for these purposes.

7. Outlook hack for Reverse Email Lookup

Outlook also provides a LinkedIn Profile Finder feature to its users, which can be utilized by using the email address of the person you want to get details about. However, it is necessary to have a LinkedIn and Outlook account to use this feature. If you have already connected to both platforms, you can get plenty of information for free from only an email address.

It is more accurate than most of the methods discussed above. However, it demands certain manual configurations before getting the desired information, making it time-consuming and less scalable.

8. Reverse Contact Email Tool

What if you want to reverse lookup upon thousands of emails? Will the above-discussed methods work?

Of course not!! (Unless you are a superhuman!!)

via GIPHY

These methods are not suitable for large-scale and are too time-consuming or resource-expensive to be utilized efficiently, especially with extensive datasets.

EnrichmentAPI’s Reverse Lookup API is an excellent solution if you want to get data on large datasets without any problems regarding speed and scalability.

You simply need an email address and an API Key, which you can get by registering at enrichmentapi.io, to get started with our reverse email lookup tool and obtain complete, accurate, and rich data about a person.

You can integrate this small Python script to start reverse lookup using just an email.

import requests
payload = {'api_key': 'APIKEY', 'email':'[email protected]'}
resp = requests.get('https://api.enrichmentapi.io/reverse_email', params=payload)
print (resp.text)

The above code will return you the following data, which includes the owner’s first and last name, job position, working location, and LinkedIn ID. Below is the output you get:

{
    "person_profile": {
        "first_name": "John",
        "last_name": "Doe",
        "position": "Data Analyst",
        "location": "Paris",
        "linkedin_id": "john-doe-653160",
        "person_api_url": "https://api.enrichmentapi.io/person?linkedin_id=john-doe-653160&api_key=APIKEY"
    }
}

If you want to extract more data about this profile, you can use the person_api_url to access detailed information about this profile.

You can integrate this API into your system, we also prepared comprehensive documentation to guide you through the basic setup.

What you can do with Reverse Email Lookup?

Identification and Verification

Reverse Email Lookup enables the verification of email address authenticity and its associated identity. It helps in eliminating any fraudulent activities, and by understanding more about the user, companies can mold their strategies to satisfy user requirements, increasing engagement and satisfaction.

Marketing and Sales Insights

Reverse Email Lookup can be served to enrich user profiles, giving valuable insights into customer identities. This thorough identification process helps businesses understand their customers better, enabling targeted marketing campaigns and sales strategies.

Lead Generation

The additional information associated with the entity can help us generate leads more effectively. Details regarding industry affiliations, company specifics, job positions, and associated individuals within the profile can be utilized to more efficiently target potential leads.

Network and Relationship Building

We can use Reverse Email Lookup to establish new relationships and connections by leveraging additional information associated with the user profile. The supplementary data allows us to initiate more precise and targeted conversations with individuals associated with that email address.

What Data Can I Get From an Email Search Tools?

Email Search Tools offer valuable insights into an individual’s identity. Here are some primary data points that you can get from known tools in the market:

1. Name and Location — Several email search APIs or tools available in the market will furnish the email owner’s complete name in their responses with the working location.
2. Job Position and Past Experience — You can also enrich the user profile with his current job position and experience with the present company, as well as details about past employment history.
3. Social Media Profiles — Email Search Tools can also give you information regarding the social media profiles of a person, encompassing platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.
4. Activities — Email search tools can gather information related to a person’s recent activities, including blogs, posts they’ve liked and shared, as well as their participation in seminars and communities.
5. Academic Background — We can also know more about a person’s academic background, including educational qualifications, degrees obtained, institutions attended, and achievements through an Email Search Tool.

Some Limits of Reverse Email Lookup

There are several limitations associated with an Reverse Lookup Email Tool:

1. Limited Information — Not all email addresses can be analyzed to get comprehensive details about any person. It might not always be possible for an email address to be connected to an extensive public information platform, limiting the amount of data that can be extracted.
2. Accuracy — The accuracy of the data depends on the source provider who is considering getting the information about a person. However, the source might not always be able to provide the complete information which can lead to inconsistency and discrepancies in the data.
3. Pricing — We are currently offering the most economical option in the market. However, to date, some companies offer data points that are not relevant/fresh & that too at higher-end pricing
4. Speed —Speed is also one of the major concerns for reverse email tools. They look for the validity of an email in real-time to confirm its authenticity and credibility which might take some time to return the response to the user.
5. Variability in Coverage —There might be a difference between each provider with the coverage of data as some tools might depend on a source with limited information while others might be using a source with extensive coverage.

Overall, some limitations might not have simple solutions, but they can be improved if the product is maintained and improved consistently.

Conclusion

Getting to know somebody on the internet is easy with the tools available. However, to scale this process you need to buy tools that can do it efficiently and that’s where the data enrichment tool enrichmentapi can help you.

Also, if you want to find emails for your future prospecting we offer a dedicated email finder API that can help you extract emails at scale.

Frequently Asked Questions