How to Find Email Addresses with 92% Accuracy – 9 Email Lookup Tools Tested

1/25/2017

How to Find Email Addresses with 92% Accuracy – 9 EmailLookup Tools Tested

process.st/find-email-address/

Ben Mulholland

January 25, 2017

We need to find email addresses for the launch in 2 weeks – about 400 should do.

Damn…

Nobody likes to hear that the next week of their time will be spent researching, selecting, and verifying hundreds ofemail addresses. It’s boring enough to make you complacent, but any mistakes are costly.

In other words, it’s one of the tedious marketing processes which we all love to hate.

After all, 400 emails are no good if they’re all blocked by spam filters.

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I knew there had to be a better way than Googling the target audience, so I tested 9 email lookup tools andmanaged to find one with 92% accuracy.

Not only that, but I had a revelation as to why many of these tools are worse than they first appear.

But enough about that – let’s get to the testing.

The test to find email addresses

Without a consistent test there’s almost no benefit to trying out these tools at all – you can’t judge one tool betterthan another unless it has the same gauntlet to run.

So, to put these tools through their paces I tasked them with to find email addresses we already knew. That waythere’s no uncertainty as to how accurate the tools are.

The 5 people I used were:

Justin’s email is private but UG’s is very public, and the other 4 have emails tied to their company domain, but withvarying degrees of publicity. Ben, Bryan, and Ina all have Google results pointing towards their correct work emailaddress, while Mike has his displayed in his LinkedIn bio.

5 email lookup tools tested

First up; yes, I know that I promised 9 tools in the title. I looked at 9 tools, but 4 are more suited to the “honorablementions” section later in the post, as they serve different purposes than pure email lookups.

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Having said that, the tools I’ll be focusing on are:

Slik Prospector

RocketReach

Hunter

Clearbit Connect

Email Format

Let’s get started.

Slik Prospector

Slik Prospector is a Chrome extension which lets you gather peoples’ email addresses through their LinkedInprofile. Just click the extra button Slik creates on their profile, and there you have the person’s email ready to go.

Boasting a 95% deliverability rate, I had high hopes for this tool. It’s easy to use, has a lot of glowing comments (andalmost 800 upvotes at the time of writing) on ProductHunt, and can export the leads you find to a CSV file.

You get 25 free verified email lookups when signing up (if one isn’t found then it doesn’t count) and after that it startsat $30 per month for an extra 300 credits per month.

Test results

In the core 5 tests Slik did pretty well, with an 80% deliverability rate and 60% success rate:

Justin – failed to deliver, but he doesn’t have an email address tied to his company’s domain, so fair enough

Ben – delivered a false email (the domain was correct, but the format was wrong)

Bryan – success

Ina – success

Mike – success 3/16

Mike – success

The verdict

Slik has reasonable deliverability and an acceptable email success rate. After double checking, it even managed toshow me that the email we had for Ina Fried was incorrect (sorry about that Ina), so extra points there.

However, I can’t recommend it, both because of Ben’s false delivered email, and the implications behind it.

Getting an incorrect email is expected – you can’t expect a tool to magically solve all of the problems you throw at it– but the bigger problem here is the lack of user feedback Slik gives.

If I didn’t already know it, I would have no idea that the email was false without checking it myself, and if I was goingto check them myself, I’d probably have the same success just searching for the email address without using a toolto do it.

Not only that, but because there’s no indication as to which emails could be false, you’d have to double check everyemail address. The failures make any successes suddenly doubtable.

The false result also makes very little sense, and (to me) suggests that Slik doesn’t check the emails it finds. Afterall, Ben’s Process Street email is publicly available in Google – one search for how many results return that emailwould show Slik what the most likely candidate is.

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Now imagine if you pay $30 and use those 300 credits to get together a list of journalists for, say, a recent productlaunch. With Slik, every one of those emails could be incorrect and I’d have no way of knowing it without puttingextra time in to manually check them.

In fact, Ben did exactly that and used Slik to try and find 40 emails before the Process Street 2.0 launch. Not onewas found.

This is why I can’t recommend Slik to find email addresses. False emails aren’t a problem, but the failing to tell yourusers that they could be incorrect negates any time they save by using it.

RocketReach

RocketReach is a web-based tool which lets you search a name, company or LinkedIn profile URL to retrieveemails. It’s a handy halfway point between tools which find email addresses from a company’s domain and thosewhich search for specific peoples’ emails.

RocketReach also gives you links to your searched contact’s social media profiles.

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While it has a free plan, you’ll only get 3 contact lookups per month. After that, the pricing starts at $49 per month for170 lookups (which also nabs you 24/7 support). Higher plans also let you sync your findings with Salesforce andgain full API access.

Test results

Due to the 3 lookup limit only Justin, Ben, and Mike were analyzed:

Justin – succeeded, bringing in both UG’s general email and three others associated with Justin

Ben – failed, as the retrieved email was incorrect

Mike – succeeded, but didn’t find his TechCrunch email

The verdict

RocketReach fared a little better than Slik, but only because it retrieves all of the email addresses it can find for your3 lookups. The problem again lies in the lack of user feedback.

Like Slik, without manually going through and verifying the email addresses there’s no way of knowing if the emailyou get is correct or not. This means that the tool cannot provide value on its own – everything has to be checked,meaning more work for the user.

Because of this I also feel like the pricing plans are a little restrictive. Without any kind of verification (other thanmanually checking each result), RocketReach’s only saving grace is the breadth of information it gives you for eachlookup.

Having easy access to a contact’s social media accounts, along with delivering multiple email addresses and howeasy it is to find a contact make RocketReach a semi-viable candidate, but only if you’re willing to put in the extratime to verify each address yourself.

Hunter

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Hunter (previously Email Hunter) is a web-based email lookup tool with a Chrome plugin for quick use.

The main site lets you search for a company domain, and lists every email address it can find on that domain – youcan’t search for a person without knowing the domain.

It also provides a “confidence score” for each result, shows the webpages the address was gathered from, and hasa separate verification tool to say how likely an email is to bounce. After all, there’s no point in trying to improve yourclickthrough rate if the whole thing bounces to begin with.

The free plan gives 150 “requests” per month, but CSV exporting is locked into the paid plans. The paid plans startat $39 per month for 1,000 requests.

A “request” is counted as a domain search which retrieves any results (10 are shown at a time), with a new“request” used to see the next 10 emails gathered from a search. A “request” is also counted when using theverification tool on an email address.

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You can also bulk search or verify emails, but doing so requires CSV exports, meaning that it’s locked into the paidplans.

Test results

Although Hunter seems to be designed more for carrying out an email lookup for an entire domain, it passed the fulltest with flying colors:

Justin – success, but didn’t retrieve his personal email (understandably)

Ben – success, even though the “common pattern” for Process Street’s emails doesn’t apply

Bryan – success, although multiple requests were required to reach his email

Ina – success, although multiple requests were required to reach her email

Mike – success, although multiple requests were required to reach his email

The verdict

Although I had to use multiple requests to find the results for specific people, Hunter is fantastic for performing anemail lookup (as long as you know the target domain).

The key here is the user feedback it provides which Slik and RocketReach are so sorely lacking.

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It allows you to see what sources it pulled the emails from in Google and gives an estimate of how likely the email isto be correct.

This is crucial for an email lookup tool.

Rather than pulling the address from seemingly nowhere, Hunter provides the information you need to judgewhether or not you need to check it yourself. It gives you enough information to take a calculated risk, rather thanmaking the decision for you.

Plus, if you’re unsure of an email, you can use the verification tool to get a further sense of how valid the address is,all without leaving the site.

Not only that, but the base results seem to be highly accurate – Ben also used Hunter to test emails for the PRcampaign of our 2.0 launch, but this time put 450 emails through the grinder.

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Admittedly he had to guess some emails using the “most likely” formula Hunter generates when searching a domain,but even with that only 34 bounced.

That’s a 92% success rate with room to spare for the ones he guessed.

In short, even on the free plan, Hunter rocks.

Clearbit Connect

Clearbit Connect is a free Gmail plugin which lets you search for 40 email addresses per month using a company’sdomain.

The main advantage of Connect is that you can use it without leaving Gmail – installing it puts a button at the top ofyour Gmail interface which opens an overlay in which you can search for email addresses. Then, if you find one youwant to use, you just have to click on it to create a new message to that person.

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Test results

Connect is extremely easy to use, and has a reasonable success rate:

Justin – failed to retrieve any emails, despite having Justin’s image for UG’s search entry

Ben – success

Bryan – success

Ina – success

Mike – failed, as the email retrieved was incorrect

The verdict

Whilst easy to use and reasonably successful, Clearbit Connect falls prey to the same trap that Slik andRocketReach suffer from – a lack of visible verification.

Again, even if more email lookups are correct than not, you have no way of knowing for sure unless you manuallyverify them yourself, which effectively neuters the convenience of having it as a Gmail plugin.

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Having said that, the sheer convenience (and free nature) ofConnect makes it ideal for the odd email search if you’re, say,looking for a specific author to pitch at a blog you want to guestpost on.

Email Format

Email Format is similar to Hunter, in that it’s a web-based toolwhich lets you search a company’s domain for emailaddresses. Format, however, focuses on finding the mostlikely format for email addresses on that domain (eg,“[email protected]”).

The design is basic, but each site email formula is given aconfidence score and you can see the email addresses itfound for each site in a second tab. For $5 a month you canalso export your results to an Excel file.

Test results

Despite being good in theory, Email Format fared badly in the test:

Justin – failed to find the domain

Ben – failed to find the domain

Bryan – failed to find the domain12/16

Ina – failed to find the domain

Mike – succeeded in finding Mike’s email, but got the domain’s email pattern wrong

The verdict

It’s good in theory, and gives some feedback as to its findings, but the number of domains it failed to even recognizewas the biggest deal breaker out of all the tools so far.

Email Format’s higher plans may be cheap, but no. Just… just no.

Honorable mentions

Before I go ahead and wrap up my findings, here’s a couple of tools I found which, whilst not fitting our focus on freetools to find specific emails, could be great catches for different purposes.

Clearbit Prospector

The older, more professional counterpart to Clearbit Connect, Clearbit Prospector is a much larger productdesigned to gather huge numbers of emails at once, whether by manually searching for types of employees on aspecific domain (eg, “engineers at clearbit.com”) or by integrating with other programs.

The price is a little steep (starting at $1k a month), but for large-scale email lookups, Prospector may well be worth alook.

People Search

People Search by Workable is similar to the main tools assessed earlier – it’s a Chrome extension which lets yousearch someone’s name to see a profile which collects data from LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and other sources.

It succeeded in finding the correct email addresses for Ben, Ina, and Mike, but the free plan has a limit of 3 searchesper day and 10 maximum per month. After that is has a “Recruiter license” for $300 per month which has no limit to

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the number of searches.

This is why People Search is down in honorable mentions – the tool itself seems very useful for getting a thoroughsummary of a person, but is geared towards recruiting purposes rather than purely finding emails.

Qwilr Sherlock

Qwilr Sherlock is a more basic tool than the others in this list, in that it’s more designed to generate possiblevariations for a person’s email from their first name, last name, and domain.

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It’s a Chrome plugin that, by entering a person’s firstname, last name, and their domain, will copy a list ofvariations of their email address to your clipboard, whichyou can then paste somewhere else for verification.

By itself this wouldn’t be too useful, but combined withthe next tool it’s a lot more viable…

Rapportive

Rapportive is a Gmail plugin which checks emailaddresses you enter, then displays profiles associatedwith them.

Again, by itself this wouldn’t be too useful to find emailaddresses, but when combined with Sherlock it checksall of the variations and shows you any that are linked toan existing profile.

It’s a little more work than just looking up a domain with Hunter, but if you don’t want to leave Gmail (and don’t want

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to use Clearbit Connect) it’s a pretty effective solution.

Find 92% of email addresses using Hunter

Although most of the tools above are useful in one way or another, the clear winner for performing small-mid scaleemail lookups is undoubtedly Hunter.

If you hadn’t already guessed, the feedback it gives is the killer.

For example, nowhere in Slik’s app does it notify you how many sources it retrieved the email address from, whatthose sources are, what kind of verification the address has been put through, or even how likely emails to thataddress are to bounce.

Hunter, meanwhile, has a competitive pricing plan, a generous free plan, a 92% success rate, and gives you all ofthe information you need to know to judge whether you need to check the address yourself.

Most of the other apps take a risk with the emails they find, then don’t tell you how big that risk was. This means thatyou’ll have to check every email they retrieve – if you’re searching for specific emails in the first place, chances arethat they’re important enough to need to be correct.

On the other hand, if you’re told than an email is 30% certain and still use it, the only one at fault is yourself forignoring the risk.

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