Email Finder

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Find verified business email addresses for any person given their name and company domain. Waterfall verification across website scraping, GitHub commits, and Gravatar.

📧 What does Email Finder do?

Email Finder takes a person's name and company domain and returns their most likely business email address. It uses a waterfall approach across multiple verification methods:

🔹 Website Scraping — Fetches the company website (homepage, /contact, /about, /team) and extracts matching emails 🔹 Pattern Detection — Analyzes found emails to detect the company's email pattern, then predicts the target person's email 🔹 GitHub Discovery — Searches public commit history for matching email addresses (great for tech companies) 🔹 Gravatar Check — Verifies if candidate emails have Gravatar profiles (indicating active use) 🔹 Pattern Generation — Generates 11 common email patterns (first.last@, flast@, first@, etc.) as fallback

❓ Why use Email Finder?

🔹 No API keys needed — Works entirely with free, public verification methods 🔹 Waterfall approach — Multiple sources increase find rate beyond any single method 🔹 Website-verified — Finds actual emails published on company websites 🔹 Pattern intelligence — Learns the company's email pattern from found emails, then predicts for the target person 🔹 Transparent results — Shows all candidates, their patterns, and verification status 🔹 Bulk processing — Find emails for hundreds of people in a single run

💡 Use cases

🔹 Sales prospecting — Find decision-maker emails for cold outreach 🔹 Recruiting — Reach candidates directly at their work email 🔹 PR & media — Contact journalists and editors at their publication 🔹 Link building — Find webmaster emails for SEO outreach 🔹 Business development — Reach potential partners at target companies 🔹 Research — Connect with experts and thought leaders

📊 Sample output

Email result

Confidence levels

💰 How much does it cost to find business emails?

Free plan estimate: ~40 email lookups per month on the Apify Free plan.

🔢 How to find business emails

1. Go to the Email Finder page on Apify
2. Add people with first name, last name, and company domain
3. Enable verification methods (Website, GitHub, Gravatar)
4. Click "Start" and download results as JSON, CSV, or Excel
5. Use the "confidence" field to prioritize outreach

📥 Input parameters

Person object

📤 Output fields

firstName, lastName, domain, company, linkedinUrl, email, confidence, candidates[], sources[], isCatchAll, hasMx, scrapedAt

Candidate object

email, pattern, status (verified/likely/unverified/invalid), source

💡 Tips

🔹 Start small — Test with 1-2 people first to see the output format before bulk runs. 🔹 Check confidence — "high" means found on website. "medium" means confirmed via Gravatar/GitHub. "low" means pattern-generated only. 🔹 GitHub token — For bulk lookups, add a GitHub personal access token (free) to avoid rate limiting. 🔹 GitHub works best for tech — Engineers, developers, and open-source contributors often have their work email in GitHub commits. 🔹 Common patterns — first.last@domain.com is the most common business email pattern (~60% of companies), followed by flast@ (~15%) and first@ (~10%). 🔹 Multiple people, same company — The actor caches website results per domain, so looking up multiple people at the same company is efficient.

Integrations

Connect Email Finder with your sales and outreach tools:

• Google Sheets — Export found emails directly to a shared prospecting spreadsheet
• Zapier — Trigger email outreach sequences when new contacts are found
• Make — Build pipelines: find emails, verify with Email Enrichment or SMTP Email Verifier, then push to your CRM
• Slack — Get notified when a batch email search completes
• Webhooks — Send results to your own API for custom processing

💻 API usage

Node.js

import{ ApifyClient }from'apify-client';
const client =newApifyClient({token:'YOUR_TOKEN'});
const run =await client.actor('automation-lab/email-finder').call({
people:[
{firstName:'John',lastName:'Smith',domain:'acme.com'},
{firstName:'Jane',lastName:'Doe',domain:'startup.io'},
],
checkGitHub:true,
});
const{ items }=await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
console.log(items);

Python

from apify_client import ApifyClient
client = ApifyClient('YOUR_TOKEN')
run = client.actor('automation-lab/email-finder').call(run_input={
'people':[
{'firstName':'John','lastName':'Smith','domain':'acme.com'},
{'firstName':'Jane','lastName':'Doe','domain':'startup.io'},
],
'checkGitHub':True,
})
items = client.dataset(run['defaultDatasetId']).list_items().items
print(items)

cURL

curl"https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/automation-lab~email-finder/runs"\
-X POST -H"Content-Type: application/json"\
-H"Authorization: Bearer YOUR_TOKEN"\
-d'{"people": [{"firstName": "John", "lastName": "Smith", "domain": "acme.com"}]}'

⚖️ Legality

Email Finder uses publicly available data sources: company websites (public pages), DNS MX record lookups, public GitHub commit history, and Gravatar's public API. No private data is accessed. Email addresses are found on public web pages or generated from common patterns. Always comply with applicable email regulations (CAN-SPAM, GDPR) when using found emails for outreach.

Use with AI agents via MCP

Email Finder is available as a tool for AI assistants that support the Model Context Protocol (MCP).

Setup for Claude Code

$claude mcp add--transport http apify "https://mcp.apify.com?tools=automation-lab/email-finder"

Setup for Claude Desktop, Cursor, or VS Code

Add this to your MCP config file:

{
"mcpServers":{
"apify":{
"url":"https://mcp.apify.com?tools=automation-lab/email-finder"
}
}
}

Example prompts

Once connected, try asking your AI assistant:

• "Find the email address for John Smith at Acme Corp"
• "Search for contact emails at these 10 companies"

Learn more in the Apify MCP documentation.

How do I find someone's business email address without paying for a tool?

You can find business email addresses using publicly available signals: company websites often list staff emails, GitHub commit history frequently contains work emails for developers, and Gravatar profiles confirm whether an address is actively used. Email Finder automates all of these checks in a waterfall — no paid data provider needed. Just supply a person's first name, last name, and company domain, and the actor returns the most likely email with a confidence rating. For basic prospecting, this covers the majority of cases at a fraction of the cost of tools like Hunter.io or Apollo.

What is email pattern detection and why does it matter?

Email pattern detection is the process of inferring how a company formats its employee email addresses by analyzing emails already published on their website or in public sources. For example, if a company's public contact page shows j.doe@acme.com and a.smith@acme.com, the detected pattern is first_initial.last@domain. Email Finder uses this to predict your target person's address with high accuracy — even if their email is never directly published. This significantly outperforms guessing from generic patterns alone.

How do I find emails for hundreds of leads in bulk?

Add all your leads to the people input array — each with firstName, lastName, and domain — and run the actor once. Email Finder processes them in sequence, caching website results per domain so multiple lookups at the same company are efficient. For large lists (500+ contacts), add a free GitHub personal access token in the githubToken field to avoid GitHub rate limiting. Export results as CSV or JSON and filter by confidence level to prioritize high-confidence emails for outreach. For a more complete workflow, combine with active lead-source actors such as Clutch Scraper, Yellow Pages Scraper, or LinkedIn Company Scraper to build lead lists, then use Email Finder to fill in contact emails.

FAQ

Q: How accurate is the email verification? A: Emails found on the company website (high confidence) are 95%+ accurate. Gravatar-confirmed emails are very reliable. Pattern-only predictions (low confidence) have ~60-70% accuracy depending on how common the company's email format is.

Q: Why do I need a GitHub token? A: GitHub limits unauthenticated API requests to 10/minute. With a personal access token (free at github.com/settings/tokens), you get 30 requests/minute. Essential for bulk lookups.

Q: Does it work for Gmail/Yahoo/personal emails? A: No. It's designed for business emails at company domains. Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook personal accounts don't follow predictable patterns.

Q: How many emails can I find per run? A: The actor processes people in sequence, checking multiple sources. Expect ~50-100 people per minute. For large lists, consider adding a GitHub token for better results.

Q: The actor didn't find an email for a person I know works at that company. Why? A: The actor relies on public data -- company website pages, GitHub commits, and Gravatar. If the person's email isn't published on any of these sources, the actor falls back to pattern generation (low confidence). Try providing the exact company domain (not a parent company domain) for better results.

Q: Can I combine this with other Apify actors? A: Yes. A common workflow is: use Website Contact Finder, Clutch Scraper, or Yellow Pages Scraper to source business leads, then pass company domains and contact names to Email Finder. Chain them with Make or Zapier.

Q: GitHub search isn't finding results. What can I do? A: GitHub limits unauthenticated API requests to 10/minute. Add a free GitHub personal access token (from github.com/settings/tokens) in the githubToken field to increase the limit to 30/minute. Also note that GitHub works best for tech companies where employees make public commits.

Other lead generation tools

🔹 Email Enrichment — More complete email verification, finding, deliverability grading, and domain discovery 🔹 SMTP Email Verifier — Validate mailbox existence before outreach 🔹 Email MX Verifier — Check whether email domains can receive mail 🔹 Website Contact Finder — Find emails, phones, and social links from any website 🔹 Clutch Scraper — Build B2B agency and service-provider lead lists 🔹 LinkedIn Company Scraper — Extract company data for prospecting workflows