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And one of the things you need to learn to outreach like a pro is the ability to find anyone’s email address.
Email Hunter (Hunter.io) helps you exactly with that.
What is Email Hunter (Hunter.io)?
First and foremost, Email Hunter (Hunter.io) gives you a superpower: the power to find anyone’s email address.
But that’s just one of its functions. This email-finding tool has many more features.
Currently, the main features of Email Hunter are:
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- Domain Search: find all the professional emails of a company.
- Email Finder: find the email address of a specific professional.
- Author Finder: find the email address of an article author.
- Email Verifier: check the validity of an email address.
Dow Do I get started with Email hunter?
To begin with, Email Hunter works on a freemium model so you can try it out for free. The free version gives you 25 searches per month and 50 verifications per month.
For the full experience, you can choose between the four Hunter.io’s pricing plans: Starter, Growth, Pro, and Enterprise.
Also, keep in mind that a yearly plan grants you a 30% discount on the total amount.
Feature#1: Domain Search
Domain Search allows you to find all the professional email addresses under a specific domain (e.g. growthrocks.com) and that are available in public on the web. The email addresses themselves are not the only info you can get through Email Hunter Domain Search.
By using Domain Search, you can enrich your list with additional information about each lead you got, such as:
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- Full name
- Phone Number
- Job Title
- Twitter Profile
- LinkedIn Profile
To make it easier for you, Email Hunter gives you the option to filter your search results to find specific people by typing their first and last names. Furthermore, you can choose to see the email addresses from particular departments of a company (e.g. Sales), depending on the job titles appearing in the search results. In case you are not sure about the spelling of the domain name, the tool has an auto-complete function.
Nevertheless, there are also some restrictions on the tool usage that you should be aware of.
- The first restriction is about the number of email addresses that are allowed to be extracted. There is a limit of 5000 email addresses per domain within the domain search option.
- The second one is about the tracking of personal email addresses. As the tool is designed for professional use, it won’t return your results with personal email addresses or other info.
Feature #2: Email Finder
With the Email Finder option, you can track specific email addresses without any particular searching and filtering. All you have to do is insert the full name of the person you are looking for and the name of their company. Within a second, you will see the results, provided they are available publicly on the web.
Keep in mind that you’ll need to fill all of the fields to get your search results.
Feature #3: Author Finder
Author Finder is the latest addition to the tool. As the name suggests, its function is to find the email of the author of a specific article.
This is especially useful as you may have a lot of reasons to want to contact the author, from link-building suggestions to just complimenting them.
To do that, just copy the URL of the article and paste it on Author Finder.
Feature #4: Email Verifier
To eliminate your email bounce rates, the email verification tool of Email Hunter will help you check if an email address is valid or not, by checking its deliverability.
There are 8 factors that define if the email address you put on the tool, is reliable or not:
- The email address format is valid and looks correct (e.g.[email protected]).
- The name of the email address actually makes sense, and it’s not a random row of characters (e.g. [email protected]).
- The domain name of the email address is used for temporary email addresses.
- Check if the email address is running under a webmail such as Gmail or Hotmail.
- Check if there are email exchanger records on this email address. It will let you know if there is a mail server authorized to accept emails under the recipient’s domain.
- Check the presence of Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) server.
- If number 6 is true, then it checks the SMTP to see if it bounces or not.
- Check if there is a catch-all domain, which means that the email sent will be received even if the domain is misspelled.
Keep in mind that the verifications are safe at a percentage of 95%. This means that even if an email address gets the checkmark from the email verifier, there is still a small chance of bouncing.
As with the Domain Search, Email Verifier comes with some restrictions:
- When it comes to a certain domain name, you can check up to 200 email addresses under the same domain every 24 hours.
- As already stated, the tool is designed for professional use only. This means that if you try to verify personal email addresses, you won’t get any results.
Other Features
Besides its 4 core features, Hunter.io has more features to offer.
Here’s what you need to know about them.
1. Chrome Extension
For Chrome users, a Hunter.io extension allows finding any email address of the website you are browsing at any given time.
Just click on the extension icon, and you’ll have all the public email addresses under this domain right in front of your page.
The installation is free, and the available requests you can use depend on the Email Hunter plan you have.
2. Google Sheets Add-on
One of the things I like the most about Email Hunter is that it helps you organize your search, from A to Z. Google sheets Add-on lets you save all the data you find right on a sheet on your google drive. So instead of making a list of domain names, or personal data in order to upload them to Email Hunter and do your search, you can simply make the integration, send the data, and enrich it easier, faster, and more organized.
The Add-on is available for free and the options you have depended on your plan.
Things to keep in mind about Google sheets Add-on:
- When you use the email finder, you have a limit of 500 rows. If you wish to do a bigger search, go with the Bulk Task option.
- You have to provide the First name, the Last name, and the company/domain name to get your result
Tip: If you use the domain name, you have more chances to get better results.
3. Bulk Tasks
So what if you are not looking only for a certain company with one domain name and only? What if you have a list of companies you want to get their email addresses and additional info? With Bulk Tasks, you don’t have to do the domain search separably for each domain name. Bulk Tasks allow you to upload a CSV or TXT file, or copy-paste the list of the domain names you are interested in. You’ll end up with the email addresses of multiple domains at once.
The same goes with the Bulk Email Finder functionality, where you are allowed to find multiple email addresses from a list of names and companies or domains. As with the simple email finder, make sure that in your file, there is all the info needed for the search (Full Name and Domain or Company). Also, bear in mind that you are allowed to find up to 150,000 email addresses per file.
Furthermore, Bulk Tasks include the Email Verifier tool. It’s one of the best options you have if you want to verify a list of multiple email addresses coming from different domain names. The Bulk Task of the email verifier will perform various checks on each email address and will give you the final results. Also, you should remember that you are not allowed to include more than 200 email addresses that are under the same domain name. The same applies to the Author Finder.
4. Campaigns
The new version of what was previously known as Mail Tracker, Campaigns help you compose campaigns and schedule follow-ups, all from your Gmail account.
Campaigns prepares the cold emails and follow-ups for you and lets you add a personal touch to every message.
Campaigns have a lot of useful features including:
- Full personalization
- Scheduling
- Email tracking
- Custom attributes
- Templates
- Multiple accounts
Email Hunter FAQ
How does Email Hunter find anyone’s email address?
Like with Google, Hunter’s bots crawl the entire web and index all publicly available email addresses. The crawlers continually update all the emails: new emails are added while publicly available and inactive emails are automatically removed or edited.
In the case of a website, Hunter returns all the email addresses using the same domain (i.e. finishing with @company.com) it has found on the web. The URLs where the email addresses were found and the date they were found are also returned in the search.
What if you want to find anyone’s email address on LinkedIn? Using one of Hunter’s browser extensions, these are the steps that it would follow to fulfill your request:
- Email Hunter searches the website of the company the person is currently working for.
- It looks for email addresses it has in its base, using the same domain name (i.e. all email addresses with @company.com)
- It checks if there’s an email address from its database that matches the profile. If there isn’t one, it uses the most common pattern to give you the most likely email address.
For more accurate results, Email Hunter uses SMTP checks to test the deliverability and score the quality of the sources (the pages where the email addresses are publicly displayed on the web).
Email Hunter, by design, works with professional email only. You aren’t going to find any information for emails with domains such as Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc.
Can I share my Email Hunter account with others?
Teams use tools to make their life easier, so, it’s okay if teams members share them with one another. That’s how it works with Email Hunter, too! You can create your team and add your colleagues as team members. This way, you’ll be able to share the requests of your subscription.
Keep in mind though that the requests will be only shared through the team members, which means that if you have for example 5K requests for a month, it will be 5K/Team Members and not 5K to each team member.
Is Email Hunter GDPR-compliant?
With one word – yes.
Hunter deals only with publicly available web data. Any information removed from a website is also removed from its database.
Even though the GDPR only applies to data from EU residents, Hunter has made a step further: it applies the requirements of the EU regulation broadly. This means that except in some rare cases, it doesn’t restrict any privacy-related feature based on the geographical location of a data subject. You can find anyone’s email address through Email Hunter and be 100% GDPR-compliant.
For more info on the matter, you can read more about Email Hunter’s GDPR Compliance, Privacy Policy, and FAQ.
Epilogue
You now know how to find anyone’s email address. And so much more.
With great power comes great responsibility. So put these superpowers to good use.
Maybe you already have. If so, what was your experience?
If you haven’t used this email finder, have you put your hands on a Hunter.io alternative?
Just leave a comment below!
Theodore has 20 years of experience running successful and profitable software products. In his free time, he coaches and consults startups. His career includes managerial posts for companies in the UK and abroad, and he has significant skills in intrapreneurship and entrepreneurship.
8 Responses
Cool reading, Theo! I have used hunter.io and it works. My concern if all this will be OK after the GDPR-armageddon! Any hints?
Hey Pavlov,
Giovanni from Hunter here. Hunter will continue to be operative after GDPR as we already applied several measures and reviewed the legislation with our lawyers. We have created a dedicated page that will show you how we will be compliant with GDPR: https://hunter.io/gdpr.
If you have questions, feel free to get in touch with us at [email protected].
Super. We will added in the near future
Hunter is one of the great tool to find email address. However for now it does not work with Linkedin, also as an email verifier it will only verify professional email accounts. To verify email accounts associated with Yahoo, Gmail, Yandex so on and so forth one needs to take help of email verification service and tools.
Hunter does have an Email Verification application, but thanks for pointing that out anyway.
Thank you, Nicolas, for such a helpful article. But after Hunter update, we can’t use all functions ;( In this case, I’m using getprospect.io
very helpful. It is great to get emails of people who run companies when you need to get in touch with them.
Hunter is really a good tool in my opinion for individual email search. But often times while building a prospect list I have come across the requirement of building a list of 1000s of email prospects that fit our profile. Then a bulk email finding tool such as emailextractoronline.com can come in handy. Saving time while helping build a quick email list.