You’ve found the perfect person to reach — right title, right company, clearly the decision-maker. There’s just one problem: you don’t have their email. Here’s the good news: companies almost always use one consistent email format across the whole organization. Crack the format once and you can reach anyone there.
The permutation method
Take the person’s first name, last name, and company domain, and generate the handful of patterns businesses actually use:
- first@company.com — jordan@acme.com
- first.last@company.com — jordan.lee@acme.com
- firstlast@company.com — jordanlee@acme.com
- flast@company.com — jlee@acme.com
- first_last@company.com — jordan_lee@acme.com
- firstl@company.com — jordanl@acme.com
Six patterns cover the overwhelming majority of B2B companies. A permutator generates all of them for you in one click.
How to confirm which one is real
A list of guesses is only useful if you can tell the live address from the dead ones — sending to all six would wreck your bounce rate. Two reliable ways to confirm:
- Verify each candidate through an email checker that does an SMTP mailbox check. The one that comes back valid is your answer; the rest you discard.
- Find one known email at the company (from a press release, an email signature, a “contact us” page) to learn the format, then apply that same pattern to your target.
When the format won’t crack
Some companies randomize addresses or use catch-all domains where every guess “works,” which tells you nothing. At that point, sourcing the verified email directly is faster than guessing — which is the whole reason a done-for-you list exists.
Generate every likely address in one click
Our free Email Permutator builds all the common patterns from a name and domain — then verify them and send only to the real one.
Written by the Verisignal team. Skip the guessing entirely — Verisignal delivers verified emails for the exact people you want to reach. Get a list →