Reverse Email Lookup
Enter email address to uncover its owner.
When you receive an email that is not addressing itself clearly, you may be intrigued to look up who the email belongs to.
Doing so also helps you focus on business leads and other important contacts over spam, phishing emails, telemarketing, and/or other emails that don’t really matter (yes, that’s an awful lot). Luckily, searching for a name from email address and teasing out who it really is behind an email address1 is actually not hard at all…
1. BeenVerified
BeenVerified is one of the best email lookup tools online and our favorite of its kind. It allows you to easily look up a person’s name, and name and even pinpoint his or her location with a reverse email lookup.
All you need to do is pop the email address into BeenVerified Email Lookup, then BeenVerified will generate a deep background report about the email owner.
- Go to BeenVerified email Search page.
- Enter the email address of the subject and click SEARCH.
- Within a minute, a detailed report will be ready and waiting.
A BeenVerified report usually includes contact info, address history, social media handles, criminal records, jobs if available. This allows you to know if he or she is legitimate or a scammer, telemarketer, or someone else who is irrelevant.
Good News: BeenVerified is now offering a 7-day trial for just $1. During the trial, you can have access to everything that comes with the standard membership.
2. Social Catfish (Supports searching by image)
As a dating investigation service, Social Catfish combines finding people and verifying their identities. It is a compact 6-in-1 social media finder that allows you to find out the owner of an email address.
With 200+ billion records in its database, the engine is not just limited to the US, but 100+ more countries and regions across the globe. This means that if you have someone outside of the US that you want to find, don’t look further than Social Catfish.
- Go to the Social Catfish Official Website.
- Type in the email address and click Search.
- Within minutes, you’ll receive a detailed report about the person you searched. This usually includes their name and a wealth of other related info.
3. Spokeo
Founded in 2006 by four Standford graduates, Spokeo started out pulling data from social media and other public sources.
Over the years, it has evolved into an engine best known for unlocking the most hidden social media profiles (so far, it’s 120+ networks). By culling data from governmental and non-governmental sources, Spokeo has more than 12 billion records in its database and it updates them on a periodical basis. So this would be a go-to option if you want to find someone on all social networks with an email address.
- Go to the Spokeo email search page.
- Enter the email address whose social media accounts are linked to and SEARCH NOW.
- You’ll get all profile matches for the email address with a photo that you can relate to. Click on the corresponding links for each social network, and you’ll be directed to the person’s profile.
4. PeopleFinders
Sending an email address doesn’t require identity verification, so very often people can use fake names and other made-up personal or business information in setting up their accounts and sending emails behind a particular motive.
Luckily, with 43 billion records in its database, PeopleFinders is another data aggregation expert that is capable of tracing almost any email address back to its actual owner. With a scan of only a few minutes, PeopleFinders help you easily uncover the email sender’s identity and heaps of information along with it.
- Go to the PeopleFinders Email Lookup page.
- Enter the email address of the subject and hit Search.
Hint: You can also click Advanced Search to narrow down your search and get more accurate results. - Wait a while as PeopleFinders generates a report of all up-to-date information about the person whose social media you’d like to dig out.
Locate the person behind an email address manually
It may not be quite as effective, but finding name by email address manually is actually possible. Google and social media are giant search engines where we can find possible leads associated with the email sender. So you can alternate between the two methods and even combine them to maximize your chance of tracing the owner of an email address.
1. Look up the email address on Google
Without a doubt, Google is our #1 source of free information to rely on. To start out, you can plug the email address into the search box, enclose it with quotations, and hit Enter (e.g. “johndoe@supereasy.com”).
Depending on the person’s online trail, you may get different results upon your search. For example, professionals and business people are more likely to leave information that can be sourced to their actual identity than average internet surfers who wish to keep a low profile as much as possible.
2. Reverse email search on social media
Another tool that can be used to your advantage is social media. You can start your search from regular haunts and those that support an email lookup (such as Facebook and Twitter). Once you’re presented with results, you can scroll through the profiles to see if the person is in some way related to your life. Conversely, if the person has a bare, fake profile or posts information that seems fabricated, far-fetched, or alarming, you might as well ignore the email.
Note that you may hit a dead-end if the email owner doesn’t make their email address public, or you’re blocked from accessing the person’s profile.
Conclusion
Whether it’s to entertain your curiosity or filter out unimportant emails from your inboxes, you might need to identify who they are behind the email address. There are two ways you can go about it: automatically and manually. The automatic tools such as BeenVerified, Spokeo, and PeopleFinders help you nail the job in a jiffy, while the manual route might require some time and patience, and it could draw a blank in certain situations.
How we chose our recommended search methods
When researching the best methods for identifying an email sender, we wanted to provide the most comprehensive recommendations possible. Our goal is to give you flexible options to uncover as much or as little information (just the name) as you need.
We started out by testing the manual search approaches – as mentioned in this article, using Google and checking social media networks – to see if an email address matched any profiles or appeared in search results. These free methods can sometimes surface an associated name or basic background details based on the person’s online trail.
However, we quickly found that these manual techniques have significant limitations in conclusively identifying who owns an email address. Google searches return pages of unrelated results where an email simply shows up or is mentioned. And if someone doesn’t make their email public on social media, you hit dead ends there as well.
This led us to explore paid email lookup services that aggregate billions of records behind the scenes into massive identification databases. By cross-referencing expansive public and private sources, these services generate detailed background reports revealing a wealth of intel tied to any given email.
The depth of information and accuracy available through paid tools is incredibly impressive thanks to the vast data networks they draw from. While more costly, services like BeenVerified and Spokeo reliably connect emails to specific people and compile contact info, address histories, social media profiles, criminal and traffic records, and much more.
Ultimately, we suggest leveraging both free manual investigation and paid email lookup services to give you flexible layers of search options. The manual methods help quickly filter out unimportant emails based on basic name matches, while paid services enable conclusive identity confirmation and expansive background details whenever needed. Our recommendations blend the best of both for your needs.
- [Stein. L]. (2023, June 2) Who owns my email address? [Online forum post]. Google.
https://support.google.com/mail/thread/218808090/who-owns-my-email-address?hl=en ↩︎
Photo by Solen Feyissa on Unsplash
Photo by Jeremy Bezanger on Unsplash
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