I've been cold emailing people for a few years now. Over that time, I've tried a bunch of tools, websites, and apps that claim to either scrub e-mails or give you verified e-mails of people.

Here are a few of my favorite ways to get people's emails, fast. This is obviously excluding extremely manual tactics like going to their personal website, GitHub, etc.

TL;DR: Use Google Sheets if you're guessing, and use RocketReach if you're not.

Here's my process for finding and verifying a company employee's email. I've used this for recruiters, B2B customer discovery, and even for mentorship. The process is slightly different (and frankly harder) if you're cold-emailing university students or professors.

The main pre-requisite is that you have to know their name and where they work (duh?). LinkedIn is a great website to get this info for free, which is why so many e-mail scraping tools are built off it.

Once I have their LinkedIn, there are two main tools I use: Google Sheets and RocketReach[rocketreach.com].

Google Sheets

While guessing e-mails and verifying them online, I found that no service gave me a 100% accuracy on whether it was actually valid. This is because some servers are "catch-all". In other words, they can verify that the domain accepts emails, but they can't confirm whether the username exists on that domain.

For example, if I tried to verify devin@opensea.io, the products would tell me that opensea.io is a valid domain that accepts e-mails, but it wouldn't confirm that devin@opensea.io is valid. They would give me the same response to "devin@opensea.io" as "mrbeastmonkey@opensea.io", and I don't think any professional has "mrbeastmonkey" as their company username.

In case you don't know what Sheets[sheets.google.com] is, it's just a spreadsheet software Google releases as a part of Drive.

Recently, I was using Google Sheets to track my cold outreach pipeline. In doing so, I discovered a little secret. In my experience (so far), I've never had an e-mail bounce using this method.

Steps to use Google Sheets:

1. Go to the target's current company's LinkedIn profile and find their current domain name. For this example, we'll use OpenSea[opensea.io] and Devin Finzer.
2. Guess the e-mail address using the target's first and last name on LinkedIn. Variations for the username to try would be: d, devin, finzer, dfinzer, devin.finzer, finzer.devin, ceo, founders.
3. Type your guessed e-mail address into a cell on Google Sheets.
4. Hover over the email address. If it's valid, then you'll either see a profile picture or a pixelated, colored version of the Google user icon. If it's invalid, you'll see the standard, blue Google user icon.
5. Repeat 2-4 until one of them works. Anything more complicated than that, and you'll probably have to use RocketReach.

RocketReach

The above tactic generally works for startups and younger companies, or on earlier employees/founders of a larger company. It would be very hard (if not impossible) to guess an Amazon software engineer's email, because large companies tend to have very complex systems of generating employee usernames.

That's why RocketReach[rocketreach.co] exists. RocketReach is a web app you can use to get people's emails from their LinkedIn accounts.

DISCLAIMER: I don't work here and am not being paid to promote it. This is just the best/easiest/most accurate tool I've found for the job so far.

Steps to use RocketReach:

1. Search "{name} {company} linkedin" and get their URL.
2. Create a RocketReach[rocketreach.co] account
3. Input the target's LinkedIn URL into the search bar.
4. Get their e-mail.

You get 5 free credits on RocketReach per month. There are technically ways that you can finesse more, but they're unethical so I won't advocate them. Now that I've found the Google Sheets method, I save RocketReach for the rare cases where I really want someone's e=mail but can't easily guess it myself.

That's pretty much all there is to it. Happy e-mailing!