Best Reverse Email Lookup Tools & Email Search Tools in 2023

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What Is a Reverse Email Lookup Tool?

A reverse email lookup tool, which can be a dedicated software system or just a search engine feature, let you enter an email address and get the owner’s personal data. This usually includes a first and last name as well as an address and phone number.

Such a tool may also obtain links to their social media accounts and additional technical information about the email address itself. 

Reverse email lookup tools enable a form of data enrichment where you attain extra information based on a limited number of data points. It may be combined with other data enrichment solutions, such as a reverse phone lookup or BIN lookup, to complete a picture about a certain website visitor.

SEON’s email search tool lets you gain personal information about someone using their email address. By searching public databases and social networks for links to that email address, the tool can reveal the email owner’s first name, last name, social media accounts, and much more.

Why Use 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 can 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 fields as well as to private individuals, on occasion. 

Of course, not all these solutions are created equal. Let’s see what you should consider before signing up.

How Do Reverse Email Lookup Tools Work?

Most of the time, you can 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.

6 Key Points when Choosing a Reverse Email Lookup Tool

1. 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?
2. How often will I need to use the tool? This may influence the kind of pricing model you should consider.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. How fast can the results be delivered? Some people will require near-instant results, but some tools can take days to deliver results.
6. Will I need additional information? Finally, consider whether you need to deepen your search with a reverse phone lookup or IP analysis, for instance, as phone numbers can act in a similar way to email addresses. 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 five points above and the limits mentioned below.

What Are the Limits of Reverse Email Lookups?

The limitations are largely down to the pricing options: Many email lookup tools are used by companies that draw you in with free searches, which culminate in you finding out that only the searches are free. The search results themselves are not. In fact, you may even find a free service, only to find it sends you towards a paid one.

Something else to consider, especially for marketers, is that verifying webmail addresses can be difficult or unavailable. For instance, hunter.io lets you clearly know that it only works with professional domains.

Then there are issues with speed. If you run, say, an ecommerce shop that needs to verify the email addresses a great deal of users in real-time, your only option is to plug in an email analysis tool into your system. The results with risk analysis tools are near-instant. With other services, you have to enter addresses one at a time and wait upward of five minutes to get the results.

Also, do not mistake reverse email search tools with an email search or email finder. While an email address search tool is designed to find an email address based on a name, a reverse email lookup tool does the opposite. As such, the email search market is made of many different solutions, and this can make it complicated to navigate.

Finally, there’s the issue of data quality. Many tools need to go through very old databases to acquire their personal information, which defeats the purpose when you’re after fresh and up-to-date details.

In fact, with some background checkers, you can often get better results simply by typing the email address into a search engine yourself. 

You can read more about how to find information manually on our guide on OSINT techniques.

The Top 10 Email Lookup Tools

Below, we’ve identified and are reviewing six email lookup solutions you can try today, including the pros and cons of each one as well as where they excel.

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 2022. Please contact us to request any changes or corrections.

SEON – Best for Risk Management

Let’s start with a solution that works great 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 can be a transaction or signup. Checking whether the user appears to exist or not is particularly useful as a pre-KYC check, so you can avoid paying for the verification of junk users. For a transaction, you’re also protecting yourself from chargebacks.

As for the kind of info you get, 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 90+ social sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Booking.com, Airbnb, and more, and gleans information from there.

With this reverse email lookup solution, the results are instant, you can perform the checks manually, via API or with a Google Chrome extension, and you even get a risk score to help your decision-making.

• Features: real-time results, API integration, Chrome extension, reverse social media lookup
• Best for: risk analysis, pre-KYC checks
• Pros of SEON: real-time results, Chrome extension, 90+ checks of social media and online platforms
• Cons of SEON: cannot offer on-premise deployment.

Pricing: $299/month minimum charge. There is also a free version, no card required.

Spokeo — Pure People Research

Spokeo, founded in 2006, offers its customers a comprehensive tool for doing background research on both people and businesses. The California-based company started as a social media aggregator, and takes 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 there is no automation provided by the service, manual lookups and fraud investigations can be greatly aided by the reverse email lookup functionality to uncover signs of trustworthiness, or lack thereof.

• 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.
  
• Pros of Spokeo: Easy to use, no integration, comprehensive.
• Cons of Spokeo: No automation, can only be used manually, can’t necessarily be used to cut down on review time in a scaled company environment. Limited searches per month.
• 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 and 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 Sheet 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.

• Features: SMTP-MX check, fast results, API check, email finder
• Best for: verifying email address lists
  
• Pros of Snov.io: easy to use, 150 free checks a month
• Cons of Snov.io: only does email verification, convoluted pricing model
  
• 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 2–10 minutes. 

Be aware that although BeenVerified says checking is free, getting all the results is not. It costs $26.89 a month for up to 100 reports.

• Features: legal document check, basic social media check
• Best for: checking on leads or potential hires
  
• Pros of BeenVerified: checks criminal records in the US
• Cons of BeenVerified: at the pricier end of the spectrum, results fairly slow and US-centric
  
• Pricing: You’ll need the $26.89 monthly plan to get up to 100 reports each month.

CheckPeople — Criminal Background Checks

Offering both a free and paid product model, 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.

Executing a search takes several minutes as data is compiled. The resulting profile focuses on criminal history, making CheckPeople a valuable tool for small businesses in particular as they onboard new employees and partners. These results require a submitted email address to receive if using the free model.

• Features: Free, comprehensive US record profiles, specializing in uncovering criminality.
• Best for: Small companies onboarding new staff members.
  
• Pros of CheckPeople: Ease of use, thorough US records checking.
• Cons of CheckPeople: Only US background data, one search at a time, quite slow to compile all data, requires email address to receive results.
  
• 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 pipeline by segmenting customer bases, finding accurate contact information, generating customer profiles that can be valuable during sales pitches, and maintaining data hygiene. Many of these processes can be automated. The software can also be tuned to target prospects that match your ICP, and can build curated email lists of those prospects.

The Adapt.io platform exists as standalone software that is integrated easily into your datastreams via APIs.

• 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.
  
• Pros of Adapt.io: Easy to use tool for aggregating new customer leads and generating demand. Automated data hygiene to smoothen sales and marketing workflows.
• Cons of Adapt.io: Reverse email lookups only really useful for sales and marketing functions, rather than security or fraud prevention.
  
• 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.

The service is integrated into your business workflows via an API, and you are not charged for email addresses that get returned with partial or no validation. The product offers functions to assess bulk lists of email addresses for validity, and also create targeted lists from those bulk lists. This can also be done from the included Google Chrome extension.

• 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 else generating email lists of valid addresses.
  
• Pros of Anymail Finder: Simple tool for business email validation and creating targeted, hygienic marketing emails lists.
• Cons of Anymail Finder: Software has very specific use cases, cannot be applied for automated fraud detection either as s standalone or as part of a security stack.
  
• Pricing: Unverified or partially verified emails do not incur a charge. Scaled pricing plan starting at 50 verified emails for $14 per month, up to 30k verified emails for $299 per month. Unused lookup credits roll over to 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.

Like BeenVerified, they will attract you with a “free” search, but you actually need to pay for the results. Like their closest competitor, they’re also very much a US-centric background check company.

The tool looks at public records, including criminal records, court records, along with a few social checks and vital records (birth, death, marriage or divorce). You can also get a professional background check by looking at publicly listed licenses, such as a lawyer or electrician license.

• Features: legal document check, basic social media check
• Best for: US background checks on potential hires, business partners or romantic interests
• Pros of InfoTracer: fast checks, transparent pay per search pricing
• Cons of InfoTracer: at the pricier end of the spectrum, results fairly slow
• 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 also lets you look up by name or phone number. 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.

It could be a nice help for a manual review, but we wouldn’t rely completely on Spytox for risk management or marketing.

• Features: free for name and phone number lookup
• Best for: free checks of single email addresses only
  
• Pros of Spytox: free, works fairly fast (5 seconds)
• Cons of Spytox: success rate was really hit-and-miss during our tests
  
• 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 their two competitors and apply it here: Free check but expensive subscription to get results, US-centric, and good for background checks using public documents.

But we do have an additional word of warning: Reviews for RecordsFinder seem to be on the negative side. A Reddit user mentions having their Chrome browser hijacked by RecordsFinder ads, probably after they clicked that suspicious button.

• Features: free, search by name or phone number in the US
• Best for: scanning public records
  
• Pros of RecordFinder: none, really
• Cons of RecordFinder: shady business model, expensive
  
• 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 7-day unlimited access, but this is likely to be an introductory offer.

Comparison of Reverse Email Lookup Tools

What Data Can I Get From an Email Search Tools?

One advantage of using an email address to research user information is that this leads to email profiling that can reveal a vast amount of information associated with that addresses. This is why using these tools is also referred to as doing an “email background check”. They are also a lot more specific than, say, finding information about a device or IP address.

Email Address Validity

The first question a reverse email search can answer is whether the email address is real or not. This is verified using an SMTP check. In short, the tool sends a request to the email address domain (@gmail.com or @yahoo.co.uk, for instance) and checks if the address exists.

Email Domain Type and Quality Verification

Among the high-quality email domains on the market are those that are less trustworthy. It all has to do with how hard it is to open an account using them. For instance, while gmail.com sounds reputable, it is free and can therefore be concerningly easy for suspicious individuals to create their own gmail accounts.

Nevertheless, there are other providers that have more stringent verification processes, such as SMS verification, which makes them more secure. Plus, quality verifications can be enhanced through domain checking websites as well as by ascertaining the email address’s age. While there are exceptions to this rule, such as when established email addresses have been involved in a data breach (more on this a little later), the newer addresses tend to be less trustworthy than their more mature counterparts.

Email Address and Social Media Lookup

One of the most powerful ways to check the validity of an email address these days is to see if it has been used to sign up to any social media platforms. Also known as social media profiling, this process will check if the address is used by someone on LinkedIn, Instagram or Facebook, among others.

This is because a good social media lookup tool will also provide information about the person’s name, location, workplace and bio – all information that would take a tremendous amount of time to collect manually, especially if you need to do this for a long list of people.

Email Address Found on Data Breaches?

A good tool can compare the address to those found on data breaches. Finding an address in one of those breaches helps us get an idea of how old the email address is, and how regularly it was used, but it may hint at illicit use if a fraudster took control of it.

Email Blacklists Check

Another way to check if fraudsters have already used that email address is to look for it on public spam blacklists. If someone’s registering with a known spammer address, you might want to block them or verify their other details manually, as the account holder might not have control over the mailbox anymore (or worse, it could be a malicious address).

Email Address Quality Evaluation

Finally, an interesting data point that can be hard to measure: how likely is it that the email address was created by a real user vs a bot or fraudster, both of whom need to work fast. This has to do with the quality of the email name itself.

Using string analysis, a good email profiling tool should be able to see if the email address looks genuine, or if it’s just been generated automatically. For instance, using a large amount of numbers or special characters can be suspicious. Same if the name in the handle and account are different.

What Is the Best Email Lookup Tool?

Finding information about someone based on their email address has plenty of use cases. It’s great for marketers, human resources, curious individuals, and risk managers. 

However, not all tools are created equal. And because there are so many different scenarios for using one of the tools, it’s hard to recommend a clear winner. However, the below might help guide your decision.

1. Best for risk management: SEON wins hands down with its frictionless integration, speed and efficiency.
2. Best for marketers: Snov.io is a great way to validate email addresses for leads or contacts. The email finder and email search are also good for finding leads.
3. Best for human resources: InfoTracer and BeenVerified both seem to do the job without being too spammy. Be aware that you can probably get the same results by manually searching through files yourself – it would be more time-consuming but ultimately much more affordable.

Just remember to do your due diligence before you sign up for any of these services. They should offer a free trial so you can test that they’re right for you.

Hopefully, this article has served as a good filter to point you in the right direction. As we’ve seen, email lookup is a powerful tool for various uses, and finding the one that works best for your needs can deliver convenience and added value.

Frequently Asked Questions

You might also be interested in reading about:

• SEON: The Best OSINT tools
• 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