When it comes to doing a person of interest OSINT investigations or research about a business, the first step is to find as many entry channels as possible. The email address can be an important starting point for finding social media accounts, website registration data or even public records. That’s why we’ve prepared an overview of the main strategies and instruments that will help you find a person’s email in no time.
What Is The Use of an OSINT Email Address Investigation?
The necessity to invest efforts in OSINT search for the person’s email may be justified by a long list of benefits and gains. Consider the following perks:
- Be Able to Do Background Checks. Employers, recruiters, or just curious individuals may use such OSINT to gather information about a person’s online presence when doing a reputation analysis. Such a small detail as a personal email can be essential for this purpose.
- Find Marketing Leads. Since email is often the primary outlet for business communication, getting hands on the email address of a company representative, a higher-up, or a potential client can be a valid strategy to drive sales or find partnerships.
- Prevent Fraud. It is crucial to check the email address of the person you are preparing to do a business deal or a financial transaction with so you will not get scammed.
- Locate a Person You Are Looking For. An email can be a key to geolocating a person. This could be useful in legal investigations, missing persons cases, or other situations where information about an individual’s place of residence is needed.
How to Find an Email Address
There’s no clear-cut answer as to what method is the best one to find a person’s email address due to the differences in databases and varying levels of the person’s privacy settings. We will discuss the main strategies suitable for each case, depending on the circumstances.
Use Online Tools to Search by Username
Oftentimes people utilize the same or similar nickname for both social media and email address names. This clue can help in detecting an email with more ease. That’s why you can either try to guess the email or utilize reverse username lookup services such as InfoTracer to expand your information pool about the person. That’s why attention to detail and systematic evidence collection matter in OSINT and can lead to a person you need with ease, even without an in-depth search.
Search With X-Ray Contact
X-Ray Contact is a tool without limitations on what social media profile link you can insert to find an email. That’s why you can search using such less conventional social media as VK.com, ask.fm or reddit.com. However, the tool works best when it comes to finding email addresses with social media that presuppose users to fill in more information and often interact with others, such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
Search Tailored for a Specific Social Media
Sometimes people themselves choose to disclose the information you are looking for during the OSINT investigation on their social media profiles. First, always check the person’s social media account information. Some users may choose to include their email address in the “Contact” or “About” sections. However, if this simple method doesn’t work, consider more advanced strategies depending on what social media profile you have:
If manual methods don’t work for the corporate search, utilize such tools as Hunter.io to allocate a corporate email with the help of company information from Facebook. Enter the company domain associated with the email addresses you are trying to find. That’s how the tool will allocate common email patterns used by the organization.
Findymail is a tool that can automate the search of emails using Instagram. It can be applied as a browser extension to simplify the process of finding email addresses in bulk. The instrument can also verify the aggregated emails automatically, which suits the purpose of finding marketing leads.
How to Use an Email Address in OSINT Investigation
However, often, finding emails might not be the final destination point of the investigation. When subjected to professional investigation, email addresses can reveal a lot about the owner to the researcher. Here are some of the ways OSINT experts might leverage an email address:
- Find Data Breach Information. Software like Have I Been Pwned? provides information on compromised email addresses in order to dig for more data about others or optimize your own cybersecurity protocols.
- Research on the Company. If the email address is associated with a specific domain, one can research information about it. This can provide insights into the organization or entity linked to the email and can open up opportunities for corporate research.
- Geolocate an IP Address. If one has the sender’s IP address from the email header, one can use geolocation tools to determine the approximate residence place of the sender.
- Study the Presence in Public Records. If the person is involved in any business activity, an email is sure evidence that leads to more details about the owner. That’s why one can explore public records to see if the email address is associated with legal or business registrations.
- Do Social Media Profiling. Email addresses can be a getaway to find much more information about a person based on their digital footprint. One can use an email to allocate social media and then study posts, photos, interactions and other content.
Concluding Thoughts
Everything considered, the task of finding email addresses based on limited input data can be a nuanced and tedious one. That’s why it’s important to be aware of the different methods one can leverage in order to allocate a person’s email. In this way, the search will be guided by the knowledge of what approach works best depending on the available data rather than turn into a fruitless guessing game.