Find Almost Any Email Address -- a Writer's Guide

You’ve got the perfect pitch. You’ve polished the piece, you’ve read it aloud, you’ve even fixed that single weird comma you always miss. There’s just one problem: you have nobody to send it to. The editor's or client's email address is locked away like a state secret.

Don't give up and dump it in the generic contact@company.com black hole. Here are the actual, practical steps I use to find the right inbox.

Start here. 90% of the time, one of these will get you what you need without spending a dime.

1. The "Guess and Check" —This is the most reliable old-school trick. Most companies use a standard format. Find a lower-level employee's email (maybe in their Twitter bio or on a press release) to figure out the pattern.

• Common patterns: firstname@domain.com, first.last@domain.com, firstinitial.lastname@domain.com.

• Once you have a good guess, use a free tool like https://www.google.com/search?q=MailTester.com. You pop in your guess, and it will tell you if the server recognizes that address. It feels like magic when it turns green.

2. The Twitter/X Advanced Search —People used to share their emails openly on Twitter. They’ve gotten savvier, but their old tweets are still there, even if the platform is called X..

• Go to Twitter's advanced search page.

• In the "From these accounts" field, put their Twitter handle.

• In the "Any of these words" field, try email, contact, at, dot.

• You'll be shocked by what you can find from a tweet they sent in 2014 asking a friend to send them a file.

3. The Guest Post Trail —When someone writes for another publication, their bio is often written by the host site's editor, who might include a direct contact email. The author might forget it's even there.

• Search Google for "[Person's Name]" + "guest post" or "[Person's Name]" + "contributor".

• Skim the bios at the bottom of the articles that pop up. It's a gold mine for finding less-guarded, direct email addresses.

4. The Newsletter Trojan Horse —If they have a newsletter, subscribe to it immediately.

• When the welcome email arrives, don't just read it—hit "Reply."

• Look closely at the address that pops up in the "To:" field. Often, it's a real, monitored address like sarah@thecleverwriter.com, not the generic no-reply@ address it was sent from.

5. The Digital Archaeologist —Sometimes a person scrubs their email from their website to reduce spam. But the internet never forgets.

• Go to the Wayback Machine (archive.org/web).

• Enter their website's URL (specifically the contact or about page).

• Look at a version of the site from a year or two ago. You can often find a plain-text email address that has since been replaced with a contact form.

• Bookmark the Wayback site—it's incredibly helpful in a ton of ways, including finding actually pages from defunct websites.

Once you find the email, use your power for good. The whole point of this sleuthing is to bypass the slush pile so a real human can read your thoughtful, personalized message along with your polished, compelling submissions.

A great pitch to the right email is magic. A bad pitch, even to the right email, is just spam. Editors and publishers talk amongst themselves. If you do something foolish, it will come back to haunt you.

Happy hunting.