If all you have is someone’s Gmail address and you want to see who owns it, where they live, or what they look like, you’ll need to run a reverse email search. This post covers general methods to find detailed information about someone using only their email address.
1. Read the Email for Clues
Let’s start with the easiest and most obvious technique: read the email and see if you can find any clues.
- Analyze the Email address: If the email sender has their account set up in such a way that their name is visible when they send emails, you’ll see it right away.
- Check the domain: All email address domain names are associated with the organization they came from. If the email you have is unique to a website or an organization, you can contact the domain owner to see if they can provide information for you. (This won’t work for public email addresses like Gmail or Yahoo.)
- Find Email Signature: Another way to see who owns the email address is through their email signature as many people have their name and other contact details included in the signature.
2. Epieos
Epieos is a versatile Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) tool that offers free services for email and phone reverse lookups.
When looking up email addresses, Epieos goes beyond the basics by checking if any existing Google account is linked to the given email address and searching for any reviews the individual might have contributed to Google Maps. Also, it extends its capabilities to identify social networks where the email address is used.
Here is how you can use this tool:
- Go to the Epieos website.
- Fill in the email address in the search bar and check the “I accept to Terms & conditions” checkbox.
- Then click Search.
Below is a report I generated using this tool. For free accounts, it reveals the name and profile picture associated with the email account. Additionally, it shows websites where the email has been registered, though it does not provide direct links to the profiles in question.
Note that the basic information is free. If you wish to get that extra information – which is blurred out in the report, you’ll need to subscribe to the service.
3. Social media
Another way to find out who is behind a Gmail address is by searching the Gmail address on social networking sites and see if you can find a profile associated with the Gmail address, posts or comments mentioning the Gmail, or a profile intro that has it listed publicly.
Facebook is the biggest social network worldwide, boasting a daily active user of more than 1 billion, so the chances that the email owner has a profile on this platform are quite high. And the best about it? – Facebook lets you search directly on the website using email addresses. Here is how to do it:
1. Go to Facebook or open the app.
2. On the search bar, type the email address and press Enter.
This method only works when the email address owner connects the particular email address to their account and has the email address listed as public. If you can’t find any profile through this, move on to the next step below.
LinkedIn is the platform that is most likely to give you authentic personal information (e.g., full name, job history, education, etc.).
What makes this site different from others is that LinkedIn profiles basically represent a resume. Overall, people on this platform are more willing to fill in genuine information about themselves – which means you have a higher chance of getting to know the email address owner if they have a LinkedIn profile associated with the exact email address.
Although LinkedIn doesn’t provide an email lookup option on the site, here’s a workaround for anyone who is looking to find someone’s profile this way.
1. Go to Outlook and log into your account.
2. Click the People option on the left panel, then click New contact.
3. Fill in the First Name as you want, then click Add more and select Email address.
4. Fill in the email address and click Create.
5. Click the contact you created, then click LinkedIn to see if there’s any LinkedIn profile associated with the email address. (You’ll need to log in to your LinkedIn account and connect it to your Microsoft Outlook account if you haven’t done this yet.)
Depending on users’ privacy settings, their profile information may be viewable only to people they’ve connected with or it may be viewable to anyone.
If there’s no profile shown up, that means no LinkedIn account is connected to that particular email address. In this case, move on and try if you can get any luck on Twitter.
Same as LinkedIn, Twitter doesn’t allow you to directly search for users by email address. But here’s the workaround for this site: you can import your email contacts to Twitter and it will use them as suggestions for who to follow and voilà – the Twitter page registered with that email address will be available to you. Here’s how to do it:
1. Add the email to your phone contact. (You can do this by going to Contacts, clicking Add, and filling in the first name as you want, along with the email address. Depending on your phone’s operating system, the process varies.)
2. Log in to the Twitter app.
3. Go to Menu > More > Settings and Privacy > Privacy and safety > Discoverability and Contacts.
4. Turn on Sync address book contacts and grant Twitter permission to access your contacts.
You’ll be able to find Twitter profiles associated with email addresses on your Contact if the owners have allowed other people to find them by their email address.
4. Social Catfish
Social Catfish is built specifically for finding people-related information. It lets you search by email address to see who it belongs to, and other information associated with the person you’re trying to track down.
To look up an email address with this tool, just go to Social Catfish, enter the email into the search bar, and click Search. Note that Social Catfish is a subscription-based service, so you’ll need to purchase a membership to view the final report.
Conclusion
There are many resources you can try when you’re looking to find out who is behind a Gmail account. You can run a reverse email lookup with Epieos and social network sites like Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter. If you don’t feel like doing all the legwork, try a dedicated people search tool like Social Catfish.
Finding out who owns a Gmail address might not be as easy as you think, especially if the person intended to hide their identity – there might be no reliable way to trace the email to its owner.
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