How to Send an Email When You Do Not Know the Email Address

It can be a challenge to send an email to someone when you do not know his/her exact email address.  Here are some tips for overcoming this challenge.

The first (and obvious) thing to do is to search the web for the person using a search engine.  Google and Bing are good search engines to use for finding someone.  In addition, search common social media sites, such as LinkedIn and Facebook, to see if the recipient has openly posted an email address.  You can also search for someone via a fee-based search sites like Spokeo (http://www.spokeo.com).

Often when you want to email someone, you will know the most common information about the person, which you can apply to the email address.  For example, you will likely know their name and company.  With that, you have what you need to get started.

The first thing to do is to search the web for the company where the recipient works.  That will enable you to learn the “domain” part (e.g. the “@companyname.com” part) of the email address.  The company URL (e.g.“http://www.companyname.com“) will often equate to the email “domain” part.  If you cannot determine the exact company name, but find variations, then jot those down.  Also, include the best known ISPs that offer email (Google, Yahoo, etc.).  The maximum length of the “domain” part is 255 characters.

Now, mix and match all of the “local” and “domain” part words you found and created into a group of email addresses.  This group can be as large or small as you would like.  If you were searching for “Mary Smith” who works for the “Very Big” company, you may create email a list of email addresses that look like this:

msmith@verybig.com	msmith@verybigcorp.com	msmith@verybiginc.com
mary.smith@verybig.com	mary.smith@verybigcorp.com	mary.smith@verybiginc.com
smith.mary@verybig.com	smith.mary@verybigcorp.com	smith.mary@verybiginc.com
marysmith@google.com	marysmith@yahoo.com	marysmith@hotmail.com

The last step is to pick one email address from the group you created.  Pick anyone, it does not matter.  The one you pick is the email address you will place in the “TO:” field of your email message.  Then, copy all of the other email addresses from your group to the “BCC:”  (Blind Carbon Copy) field.  The result of doing this will be that the recipient will likely receive the email, but only see the one email address in the “TO:” field.  The recipient never sees the “BCC” field.  So S/he will never know you placed many more email addresses in the “BCC:” field.  The secondary benefit is that you will likely receive “undeliverable” email messages for all of the invalid email address.  The email address for the one you did not receive an “undeliverable” email message is the actual email address.  Voilà!
David Schuchman