List of the Best Reverse Email Lookup Tools
The Top 10 Email Lookup Tools
Below, we’ve identified and reviewed ten email lookup solutions you can try today, including the pros, cons, and top features of each one.
Disclaimer: Everything in this article was gleaned from research, including user reviews. We did not have time to manually test all the tools. This guide was last updated in Q3 2023. Please contact us to request any changes or corrections.
SEON
Best for Risk Management
Let’s start with a solution that works seamlessly for fraud prevention, risk management, and general business protection. SEON gives you extra data to make intelligent decisions about whether you should accept a user action or not.
That action could be a transaction or signup. Checking whether the user appears to exist or not is particularly useful as a pre-Know Your Customer (KYC) check, so you can avoid paying for the verification of junk users. For a transaction, you’re also protecting yourself from chargebacks.
SEON lets you know everything you need about the email address domain. Its key feature, however, is the reverse social media lookup, which finds whether the address has been used on 50+ social sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Booking.com, Airbnb, and more, and gleans information from there.
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Pros
- Real-time results
- API integration
- Chrome extension
- Reverse social media lookup
Cons
- Cannot offer on-premise deployment
- Features: SEON lets you perform complete user digital fingerprinting based on an email address, but also a phone number or IP address. It is one of the few tools that returns social media profiles as part of its results.
- Best for: Risk analysis, pre-KYC checks
- Pricing: Starts at $599. There is also a free version, no card required.
Spokeo
Pure People Research
Spokeo, founded in 2006, offers customers a comprehensive tool for doing background research on people and businesses. The California-based company started as a social media aggregator, then took that experience to its current product offering, which scans over 120 social sites for real-time user data, including dating sites, blog posts, and product reviews. In total, the data amounts to over 12 billion records to cross-reference.
Though the service doesn’t provide automation, its reverse email lookup functionality can greatly aid manual lookups and fraud investigations to uncover signs of trustworthiness, or lack thereof.
Pros
- Easy to use
- No integration
- Comprehensive
Cons
- No automation
- Can only be used manually
- Limited searches per month
- Features: The platform offers manual lookups based on email address, phone number, name, location, or username, generating comprehensive profiles from those data points.
- Best for: Manual lookups when conducting fraud investigations or other people-intelligence procedures.
- Pricing: Three-tiered pricing with custom plans available: $19.95 for 100 monthly searches, $44.85 for a 3-month membership of 100 searches per month, and $66.95 for 500 monthly searches.
Snov.io
Great for Marketers
Snov.io – or Snovio – has all the features you might need for validating email addresses. It’s blazing fast, delivering results in under one minute. Like many other tools, it uses an SMTP-MX check to verify the deliverability of the address.
You can upload bulk addresses and export the results in CSV, XLSX, or Google Sheets formats. Another strong point is that this tool’s customer service gets loads of praise from users. Note that Snov.io also has an email finder/email search function, which can be handy for marketers.
Pros
- Easy to use
- 150 free checks a month
Cons
- Only email verification
- Convoluted pricing model
- Features: SMTP-MX check, fast results, API check, email finder
- Best for: Verifying email address lists.
- Pricing: You pay in Snov.io credits. Each verified email costs 0.5 credits. You get 150 free credits a month, and you’re only charged if the email is valid. There are then five monthly plans depending on the number of credits you need, from 1,000 a month ($30) to 100,000 ($554 a month). Their custom package for outreach professionals starts at $999 per month.
BeenVerified
Good for Background Checks (US only)
The free version of BeenVerified will give you email verification and a few more data points: In some cases, the person’s name from LinkedIn, and a check for two linked social media accounts (Twitter and LinkedIn).
It is for US use only and will trawl through legal documents to locate info on criminal records and bankruptcy reports. Each search takes between two and ten minutes.
Although BeenVerified says checking is free, getting all the results is not. It costs $26.89 a month for up to 100 reports.
Pros
- Checks criminal records in the US
Cons
- Results fairly slow and US-centric
- Features: Legal document check, basic social media check.
- Best for: Checking on leads or potential hires.
- Pricing: You’ll need the $26.89 monthly plan to get up to 100 reports each month.
CheckPeople
Criminal Background Checks
CheckPeople offers both free and paid product models, with the paid version offering unlimited lookups. The software takes name, phone, or address data and conducts a thorough background search of available US public records, including criminal records, arrest records, previous aliases, and court appearances. Notably, this service currently only scrutinizes the United States and outlying territories.
Pros
- Ease of use
- Thorough US records checking
Cons
- Only US background data
- One search at a time
- Quite slow
- Requires email address
- Features: Free, comprehensive US record profiles, specializing in uncovering criminality.
- Best for: Small companies onboarding new staff members.
- Pricing: CheckPeople has one-month, two-month, and annual plans starting at $29.17 per month. The Savvy Users plan costs $45.94 for two months. You can also buy a five-day trial for just $1.
Adapt.io
B2B Email Enrichment
Though most options on this list focus on background checks, Adapt.io’s reverse email lookups are designed for B2B marketing and sales.
After entering a business email address, the resulting data helps build a pipeline by segmenting customer bases, finding accurate contact information, generating customer profiles that can be valuable during sales pitches, and maintaining data hygiene.
Pros
- Easy to use tool
- Automated data hygiene
Cons
- Lookups only useful for sales-marketing functions
- Features: Reverse lookup of business emails informs the Lead Builder and Prospector features, which enrich with business-relevant data for sales, and help demand generation teams with high-quality leads, connecting you to industry champions.
- Best for: Sales and marketing teams looking to close deals efficiently and generate demand through targeted and accurate email lists.
- Pricing: Currently Adapt.io offers quotes behind a registration form. Contact their sales team to get a quote relevant to your company size and use cases.
Anymail Finder
Business and Personal Email Verification
The Anymail Finder product delivers a service that helps businesses maintain their marketing and sales email hygiene, maintaining low bounce rates and verifying corporate email addresses. Entering a business or corporate email address checks that address for signs of spam, invalid business domains, and disposable email addresses to make sure your demand-generating email lists are efficient, while also keeping your sender reputation high.
Pros
- Simple tool for business email validation
Cons
- Very specific use cases
- Features: Corporate email lookups and validation, targeted email list generation, convenient Chrome extension.
- Best for: Marketing and sales teams either conducting individual manual business email lookups to check validity or generating email lists of valid addresses.
- Pricing: Unverified or partially verified emails do not incur a charge. Scaled pricing plan starts at 50 verified emails for $14 per month, up to 30k verified emails for $299 per month. Unused lookup credits roll over to the next pay period.
InfoTracer
Unlimited Subscription for Lookups
InfoTracer bundles all its services together with its unlimited plans, which means you’ll get reverse email search along with people lookup, background lookup, and court lookups.
The tool looks at public records, including criminal records and court records, along with a few social checks and vital records (birth, death, marriage, and divorce). You can also get a professional background check by looking at publicly listed licenses, such as a lawyer or electrician licenses.
Pros
- Transparent pay-per-search pricing
Cons
- For that price, seems very slow.
- Features: Legal document check, basic social media check.
- Best for: US background checks on potential hires, business partners or romantic interests.
- Pricing: InfoTracer lets you pay per search: People Search ($1.50); Background Report ($20); Criminal Records Report ($5); Background Business Report ($25); UCC Search ($1.50); License Plate Verification ($5); Vehicle History Report ($9); Bankruptcies, Liens & Judgments Report ($5); Property Record Report ($5).
Spytox
Lightweight Data Enrichment
A simple online tool, Spytox lets you look up by name or phone number, as well as email. The advantage is that it’s completely free and fairly fast, so it is ideal for ad-hoc searches.
Unfortunately, the tool didn’t seem to work 100% of the time during our testing, and the results were mixed in quality, rather than “explosive”, as the website promises.
Pros
- Free
- Works fairly fast (five seconds)
Cons
- Success rate was really hit-and-miss during our tests
- Features: Free for name and phone number lookup.
- Best for: Free checks of single email addresses only.
- Pricing: It’s completely free.
RecordsFinder
Sketchy US Service for Background Checks
RecordsFinder is so similar to BeenVerified and InfoTracer, one has to wonder if they’re not all run by the same people. In fact, you could pretty much copy and paste what we wrote about RecordsFinder’s two competitors and apply it here: Free check but expensive subscription to get results, US-centric, and good for background checks using public documents.
Pros
- None, really
Cons
- Shady business model
- Expensive
- Features: Free, search by name or phone number in the US.
- Best for: Scanning public records.
- Pricing: The pricing model is not as transparent as we have seen with other vendors. A single one-off report costs $2.95 and comes with seven-day unlimited access, but this is likely to be an introductory offer.
What Is a Reverse Email Lookup Tool?
A reverse email lookup tool lets you enter an email address and get its owner’s personal data. This usually includes a first and last name, but may also include a residential address, phone number, or social media handle.
Reverse email lookup tools are a form of user fingerprinting, which let you attain extra information based on a limited number of data points.
Reasons to rely on reverse email lookup tools include open source intelligence (OSINT), risk management, or marketing, among others.
How Do Reverse Email Lookup Tools Work?
Most of the time, you simply enter the email address into the search bar and press Enter. The results will appear directly on the website. Some providers also deliver PDF reports.
For more advanced lookups, you can use API calls or web browser extensions. You can also upload lists of email addresses via CSV file or Excel spreadsheet.
Why Use Reverse Email Lookup Tools?
Both companies and individuals rely on email search tools. They tend to use these solutions for three key reasons:
- Marketing: For marketers or sales teams, it’s essential to check if the email addresses they have collected are valid. Because you don’t want your email marketing newsletters to bounce, it’s wise to confirm you’re dealing with real people as soon as possible.
- Background checks: Usually performed by professionals who need more info about a potential hire, a prospect, or a business contact. Some individuals request them too, for every reason you can imagine, including getting the full picture about a new romantic interest, learning more about someone who got in touch out of the blue, or, unfortunately, cyberstalking.
- Risk analysis: Small and large businesses use reverse email search to learn more about their users in the context of fraud prevention, risk assessment, and cybersecurity.
The above professionals are the most likely to employ these tools – but they can be equally useful to other businesses as well as to private individuals. Of course, not all these solutions are created equal. Let’s see what you should consider before signing up.
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Six Key Points when Choosing a Reverse Email Lookup Tool
- What is my goal? Are you looking to create more complete customer profiles? Do you handle riskier transactions? Do you need more information on prospects or customers?
- How often will I need to use the tool? This may influence the kind of pricing model you should consider.
- How detailed do I need the results to be? This ties in with the goals of your queries, especially if you are in the risk management sphere.
- Does the tool comply with my legal data protection requirements? Obtaining data on users can put your company at risk if it’s done with the wrong tool.
- How fast can the results be delivered? Some people will require near-instant results, but some tools can take days to deliver results.
- Will I need additional information? Consider whether you need to deepen your search with a reverse phone lookup or IP analysis, for instance. Some tools offer this while others do not.
For this comparison article, we’ve tried to eliminate all the tools that were obviously out of scope based on the points above and the limits mentioned below.
Comparison of Reverse Email Lookup Tools
| SEON | Snov.io | BeenVerified | InfoTracer | Spytox | RecordsFinder | Spokeo | CheckPeople | Adapt.io | Anymail Finder | |
| Name and address | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Social media check | 50+ | No | 3–5 | 3–5 | No | 3–5 | 120+ | No | No | No |
| Speed | Real-time | 2–5 minutes | 10 minutes per check | 10 minutes per check | 5 seconds | 10 minutes per check | 15 seconds | 2-5 minutes | N/A | N/A |
| US public records | No | No | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Some | No |
| Email address verification | Yes | Yes | No | No | No | No | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
| Extra features? | Risk scoring | Prospect quality campaign building | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | Sales & marketing segmentation, list-building | Email verification |
| Pricing | $599/month minimum charge | $30/month for 1,000 credits | $22.86/ month for unlimited checks | Pay per record, from $1.50 for a people search to $25 for a background business report. | free | $12.95 per search | $19.95/month | $29.17/month | starts at $49/month | starts at $14/50 lookups |
| Free trial? | Included | No | No | No | N/A | No | No | Limited free searched | contact sales team | Yes |
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Frequently Asked Questions
No, we are completely transparent with our pricing structure, which you can find on our website (volume discounts are available, as well as a non-committal free trial).
Most email lookup tools enrich data from open-source intelligence (OSINT) databases. SEON aggregates device, IP, and social media information.
It depends on the tool or service. For SEON, all data sourced is GDPR-compliant, ensuring legality and compliance with the necessary regulators for the EU.
You might also be interested in reading about:
- SEON: Reverse Email Lookup: How It Works & How to Perform It
- SEON: How to Find Email Accounts by Email Address Only
- SEON: How an Email Data Breach Helps You to Verify Users
Learn more about:
Browser Fingerprinting | Device Fingerprinting | Fraud Detection API | Fraud Detection with Machine Learning & AI
