As an online entrepreneur you often need to e-mail bloggers, podcasters, business owners, and other very busy people. It’s usually a challenge to get in touch with them directly because they don’t advertise their e-mail address. By doing just a little digging, though, you can quickly find almost anyone’s e-mail address even if you only know their domain name.
Popular influencers don’t publicize their e-mail address for very legitimate reasons: they would get so much e-mail that they wouldn’t be able to answer it all. By using a contact form or generic e-mail address on their website, they can filter their messages to an assistant who sorts through what needs to be seen and what doesn’t. It’s not that their e-mail address is necessarily a secret, but they don’t go out of their way to share it online.
One of the best way to reach important people is to bypass these gatekeepers and get your message directly into your recipient’s inbox. Sure, you can guess what their e-mail address might be and send your message to a dozen different addresses in the hope of getting it right. But there’s a better way.
Most of the time e-mail addresses follow one of just a few different formats. Here are a few possible examples using my name:
Other slightly less popular formats include:
Valid characters for the “local” part of an e-mail address include letters (a-z and A-Z), numbers (0-9), hyphens (-), underscores (_), and plus signs (+). While technically speaking e-mail addresses could be set up to treat uppercase and lowercase addresses differently, in practice e-mail addresses are configured not to be case sensitive ([email protected] and [email protected] are equivalent).
Now that we have a relatively short list of nine likely possibilities, we can head over to http://tools.email-checker.com to see if any of the addresses on the list are valid:
The tool automatically checks with the mail server on my domain to see if each of the addresses are valid. And voila! There’s my e-mail address right at the top. Now you don’t have to just guess — you can have a pretty good idea what e-mail address to use. At the very least, it saves you time taking stabs in the dark hoping that an e-mail address is “good.”
The technique is not foolproof, but it works enough of the time to be worth trying!
Matt Thomas
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