Find prospects as you browse the web with Clearbit Connect

Find any email in under five seconds

Clearbit Connect makes it easy to get in touch with anyone—right from your inbox –– for free.

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Powering the world's most advanced companies

Find any sales email address

Search for companies

Just type the name of the company you are trying to contact and instantly see available contacts at that account.

Enter a company domain

Recent Companies:

Atlassian

atlassian.com

Segment

segment.com

Clearbit

clearbit.com

Asana

asana.com

Okta

okta.com

Search for people

Find the best contact and search by name, job title, or role.

Role: Any

Seniority: Director

Search by name or title

Top contacts at Segment:

Robin Spencer

VP of Engineering

David Cancel

Senior Director of Sales

Elena Hill

VP Sales

Note, this is fake data for demo purposes.

Find email and details

Learn everything about your prospects including location, job title, social profiles, and email address.

Email Dharmesh Shah

Dharmesh Shah

Founder & CTO


Email

shah@hubspot.com

Company

HubSpot

Location

Boston, US

Note, this is fake data for demo purposes.

Find company information

Browse to any company website, and learn everything about that company, including location, number of employees, estimated annual revenue, technology used, and more.

Visit hubspot.com

Name

HubSpot

Location

Boston, US

Employees

5K - 10K

Industry

Software

Est. Revenue

$1B-$5B

Matches ICP?

Join 300,000+ people using Connect

"If you sell, market, or recruit over email, you need this Gmail extension from @clearbit"

Gordon Wintrob

@gwintrob

"Clearbit's Chrome plugin for Gmail looks killer"

Rand Fishkin

@randfish

"This is shocking simple and surprisingly useful. Nicely done!"

Dharmesh Shah

@dharmesh

"If you ever used and loved @rapportive before it went to 💩, then you should definitely be using @Clearbit Connect"

Austin Smith

@awwstn

"Clearbit Connect is my favorite Chrome extension. Now it's public"

Ryan Hoover

@rrhoover

"Kind of blown away by Clearbit Connect ... - Finding emails used to be so time-consuming"

Thibaut Davoult

@thibautdavoult

Frequently asked questions

  • What is Clearbit?

    Hunches only go so far. Clearbit fills in the knowledge gaps with real-time context on companies and employees. We help marketers create more personalized experiences — data for customizing high-traffic websites, precise lead scoring and routing, that sort of thing. And we help sales teams with enriched CRM data to power relevant outreach, custom sales alerts, and more.

  • Is Clearbit Connect free?

    We want everyone to be able to experience the benefits of powering their outbound programs with accurate emails from the right contacts at the right companies. And this is how we are doing it. Naturally, we run a business too and hope to create opportunities from our extension. A good example being Connect users who want to move from free extension to Clearbit Capture, a capability of ours that allows you to automatically add accounts and key buyer contacts to your CRM from qualified companies that show intent.

  • How does Connect work?

    As you browse the web, Connect checks each domain you visit to see if they match your ideal customer profile. If they do, the extension button changes color to notify you.

    Clicking on the Connect widget, you will see lots of information about the company you are currently visiting, including number of employees, funding, and more. If you go to the "People" tab, we will show you a list of people working at that company. Clicking into any of these people will give you the option to get their email, using one of your 10 monthly credits.

    Within Gmail, it works similarly, but gives you context on the person you are currently emailing. You can also search for companies and contacts without leaving Gmail.

  • How many free credits does Connect offer?

    Every Connect user receives 10 free credits per month, which is refreshed monthly on the same calendar day as your sign-up. A credit is spent every time an email is revealed within the extension. You’re able to check your credit usage at any time in your Connect settings.

  • Is there a way to earn more free credits?

    Not currently. However, we are exploring ways to enable this in the future. Though it is worth noting that with our paid Clearbit Capture capability, customers are able to identify and send thousands of contacts directly to their CRMs.

  • What are other free ways to find email addresses?

    Aside from using other free email finding extensions, there are a few other (albeit less efficient) ways to source B2B email addresses. They include asking for them or collecting them when you’re talking to prospects in person or on the phone; using intelligent guessing based on predictable naming conventions (e.g. firstname@company.com or firstname.lastname@company.com); searching for email addresses on company websites; and using WHOIS databases to find owners of websites. You can read more about these methods in our guide below.

  • Does Connect see my personal data?

    As part of the set-up and usage of Connect, we collect three types of data: Personally Identifiable Information (PII) by way of email and name when you create an account via signing up with Google; Location data by way of IP address again when you create an account via signing up with Google; Web history by way of collecting URLs in order to provide enriched company data based on those URLs (note: we don’t associate Web history with you as a user.). We also require access to your personal communications and we enrich email addresses within Gmail.

  • What other free tools does Clearbit offer?

    In addition to our collection of free APIs (e.g. our Logo API), we offer the Weekly Visitor Report, which is a weekly dashboard of de-anonymized companies visiting your website and showing intent, and the Total Addressable Market (TAM) Calculator, which enables you to utilize our database of 50M companies to generate your TAM. Explore all of Clearbit’s free tools.

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Save time and get better results with Connect. Start qualifying companies as you browse, and find email addresses easily.

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The History of Finding Email Addresses

Whether you're trying to sell, market, or recruit, an email address provides a direct, personal connection to virtually anyone, from a junior exec to the CEO of Google. But with 4.3 billion accounts in existence, the real challenge is finding a decision maker's email address.

Over the years, resourceful email hunters have come up with all manner of search strategies. The earliest attempts relied on plain old guesswork. Later years saw salespeople spend their days sifting through hundreds of website pages and social media accounts. Today, more than 300,000+ marketers and sellers use a simpler, smarter approach: Clearbit Connect.

We're recapping the history of email finding, from the first prehistoric tactics, through to today's powerful, data-driven tools.

1. Ask for Their Email

The oldest tactic in the book is also the least effective: asking for an email address.

If a salesperson was able to find a prospect's phone number, locate a company contact form, or connect on social media, they could try their luck at asking, plainly and simply, if they'd share their email address.

In a world where spam emails and phishing attacks weren't as prevalent, this approach could—occasionally—work. But today, few people are willing to offer up their personal information to a complete stranger, and asking for an email is more likely to be met with suspicion than success.

Speed: 2

Accurarcy: 10

Grade: B

2. Intelligent Guessing

When asking for an email address failed, many salespeople would try to get lucky and guess it.

This process relied on the fact that many companies followed simple, predictable naming conventions for their email addresses:

  • firstname@company.com or
  • firstnamelastname@company.com

If they were lucky, finding a contact's address could be as simple as applying this email pattern. If they were after the email address of Bill Example from software.com, they might try:

  • bill@software.com or
  • billexample@software.com

Armed with their guesses, they could use a free service like Email Checker or MailTester to uncover a verified email, running simple diagnostic tests to see whether it was connected to a functional mailbox.

This approach sometimes worked, but because addresses that follow the firstname@company.com email format are so easy to guess, many companies started using a less obvious naming schema. That's where our next strategy came in.

Speed: 2

Accurarcy: 2

Grade: C-

3. Search Relevant Websites

Occasionally, a company will publicize individual contact details on their website. Though rare (automated scrapers can find and spam publicly listed email addresses), savvy searchers could sometimes find their desired email address on one of a handful of key website pages:

  • About us pages sometimes include contact information for individual team members.
  • Contact us pages will occasionally offer an email address in addition to the obligatory contact form.
  • Author pages (typically found on a blog) offer another shot at finding a personal email.

If these pages failed, personal websites or portfolios (like firstnamelastname.com or about.me/firstnamelastname) would sometimes offer another shot at success.

In the likely event that their search failed to yield an email address, these pages could still provide other ways — like social media—to get in touch with a contact and begin the search again.

Speed: 2

Accurarcy: 8

Grade: B-

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4. Check WHOIS Lookup

The WHOIS database provides a record of ownership for websites, including contact information for the site's registered owner. By searching for their contact's website through the WHOIS lookup service, it was sometimes possible to find a working email address.

If a contact worked at a thousand-strong enterprise company, WHOIS data would yield contact information for the domain administrator. By applying the same principle to a contact's personal website, you could occasionally track down the right email address.

This approach grew less effective over time: Services like WhoisGuard can hide a registrant's contact information, and even if you do find an email address, there are no requirements for keeping the information up to date.

Speed: 3

Accurarcy: 3

Grade: C

5. Use an Email Permutator

Back in 2012, Distilled released a free email permutator spreadsheet, designed to systematically generate dozens of best guess email variations. Aspiring email hunters could add a contact's first name, last name, and company name, and watch 50 possible email addresses appear.

Other free tools follow a similar principle, chopping and changing the order of inputted information, adding hyphens, underscores, and other common types of punctuation to create an exhaustive list of variations. Armed with a list of possible addresses, email validators like NeverBounce or MailTester could (hopefully) pick out a legitimate email.

Done on any kind of useful scale, this process was expensive and time-consuming. Most effective email validators are paid services, costing upwards of $0.01 per email checked. If we validated 50 emails per contact, and we did this for 10 people at each of 100 target companies, we'd rack up costs of $500 — without any guarantee of finding a valid email address.

Speed: 5

Accurarcy: 3

Grade: C+

6. Use Google's Search Operators

If manual attempts to search a website bore no fruit, tenacious email hunters could enlist the help of Google's advanced search operators.

While a regular Google search will scour the entire indexed web, searches can be fine-tuned using a handful of commands.Site:example.com limits searches to pages within theexample.com domain; adding quotation marks around a search term includes only exact matches; and the * symbol functions as a wild card, returning all pages that contain variations of a search term.

Using these functions, it was possible to build out a few search strings to help track down elusive email addresses:

  • site:domain.com “firstname lastname” email OR contact
  • site:domain.com “firstname lastname” contact
  • “firstname lastname” email
  • “firstname lastname” contact
  • firstname “*@example.com” OR “@gmail.com”

If they were lucky, and their target email was listed somewhere on the public web, these searches—with enough time and effort behind them—could help find it.

Speed: 5

Accurarcy: 5

Grade: B-

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7. Check Twitter's Advanced Search

In 2013, Twitter became one of the 10 most visited websites in the world, opening the door to another strategy for finding email addresses.

Occasionally (let's be honest—very occasionally), people share their email address in their social profiles. With a contact's Twitter handle, it became easy to sift through their tweets and find mention of an email address. Email hunters would log in to Twitter and load up their advanced search page.

They would add a contact's Twitter handle to the field labeled “From these accounts,” and add words they'd associate with an email address—email, contact me, or a website domain—to the “Any of these words” field. After hitting search, Twitter would return a complete list of every tweet that contained one of the chosen words — and hopefully, an email address.

Speed: 6

Accurarcy: 6

Grade: B

8. Export Your LinkedIn Connections

Recent changes to LinkedIn's data privacy policies have given users the right to access all of the data they generate on the site. That includes a list of all their contacts — and their email addresses.

This feature can be used by signing in to LinkedIn, and heading to this URL. Once there, navigating through dozens of privacy options will reveal a section titled “How LinkedIn uses your data.”Just below the header, there are options for downloading contact data.

The next step is to select “Connections” from the grid of options, and hit Request archive. After reentering login details and waiting roughly 10 minutes (longer for accounts with lots of contacts), LinkedIn sends an email containing a spreadsheet of contacts data.

One of the columns contains the email address each contact has saved within their social media profiles (in the example below, I've blurred out all the real email addresses).

Though this process is great for quickly soliciting email addresses for your entire LinkedIn network (without having to rely on Sales Navigator — formally known as Rapportive), it only works for contacts: If someone refuses a connection request (or doesn't use the platform), the method won't work.

Speed: 6

Accurarcy: 9

Grade: A-

9. Clearbit Connect

With enough perseverance (and luck), all of the tactics outlined here have been used for finding email addresses, but in the modern era, there's no need to rely on clunky workarounds and guesswork. If you're looking for a faster, more effective way to find accurate email addresses, you can join the 300,000+ people who use Clearbit Connect.

To get started, install the Gmail extension. Once you've connected your email account, you're good to go.

With the extension installed, you can find email addresses straight from your inbox: Just hit the Clearbit button, add your chosen domain, and pick the right email address from the list that appears.

In a couple of seconds, you can find virtually any email address, along with information about the recipient's role, industry, location, company size, and financials. There's no need to take extra steps to verify the email: All the data is accurate.

Speed: 9

Accurarcy: 9

Grade: A

Install your new favourite extension now

Save time and get better results with Connect. Start qualifying companies as you browse, and find email addresses easily.

Install for Chrome now