How to Reverse Look Up an Email Address for Free

If you received an email message with no sender's name on it, or if you are receiving continuous spam / scam emails from anonymous users, or if you stumbled upon an email address within your contacts that you have no idea who it belongs to, or if someone gave you their email address that you suspect to be fake, you can do a couple of things to check the origin of the email address in question and try to find who owns it.

In another post, I talked about how to search people by email in detail by providing some useful tips and tools to use in your search. In this post, I will continue with talking about some other methods and email lookup sites by giving some examples.

So, let's assume that we have an email address, say web@tutsandtips.com, and we want to find out who it belongs to. Our very first option, which is also the easiest and quickest one, is to ask our good old friend Google.

Reverse Email Address Lookup on Google

Google is considered to be the best search engine around, where you can find almost anything you seek. To look up an email address on Google, simply go to google.com and enter the email address into the search box by adding double quotes around it like the following:

"web@tutsandtips.com"

TIP: Using double quotes while searching for a term on Google ensures to return only the pages that contain the exact term in the search results.

After that, click the search button. Any website / webpage on the Internet (indexed by Google) that has the given email address on it will be displayed in the search results.

(© 2020 Google LLC, used with permission. Google and the Google logo are registered trademarks of Google LLC.)

If the email address you are looking up appears on any website in the world (e.g. social networks, forums, blogs, directories, whois sites - see who owns website), you have a chance to find it on the search results. You can then check the links Google returned and see what further information you can find about the email address. Sometimes, it is possible to find the name, phone and even the physical address of the person who owns it. However, not all emails can be found like this, since usually email users do not make their email addresses public by posting them on websites. Still, this is a great quick email lookup method.

You can also do your search on other search engines such as Yahoo, Bing or Yandex.

Reverse Email Address Lookup on Facebook

If you couldn't find anything on Google, you can try Facebook as the next option. Facebook is not a search engine, hence it doesn't work the way Google works. But if you know how to find information on it, it can be pretty useful.

To look up an email address on Facebook, simply log into your account on facebook.com and enter the email address into the search box at the top.

What Facebook will do is that if there are any users who registered their Facebook account using this email address, they will be listed on the search results. Note that, this method will not work for all Facebook users; it will work only for users who have set the "Who can look you up using the email address you provided?" privacy setting on their account to Everyone.

For further details about this method, you can also check our tutorial about Facebook search by email.

Also Check: Facebook Search People by City

Reverse Email Address Lookup by Sender's IP

One of the methods for looking up an email address is to check from which IP address the email came from. The IP address of the sender can (usually) be found in the Header details of the email, in one of the Received: entries. Most email account providers allow you to view full headers of an email. Once you get the IP of the sender, you can then locate the IP using one of the online IP lookup tools.

This method will be useful only for finding the location of the sender, also in some cases, especially spammers and scammers hide their true IP info, which renders this method to be non-reliable.

Free Reverse Email Lookup Sites

If neither Google nor Facebook helped you with your email address lookup and if you couldn't find anything using the IP address, you can try the following free email lookup websites and see if you can find anything:

1. Spokeo

Spokeo is a popular tool that provides free online name, email address, phone and address lookups. I don't know if it always returns accurate results but I tried it with an email address and it returned the correct first name and last name information.

2. Pipl

Pipl is a people search engine where you can find contact, social and professional information about people. Simply enter the email you want to look up and start your search.

3. EmailSherlock

EmailSherlock is another email lookup website where you can quickly conduct a reverse email search to find its owner. It provides detailed information whether the email address is valid and if it is used on any social media sites.

4. Address Search

Address Search is a platform where you can search for emails, reverse look up email addresses and mailing addresses.

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If everything else fails to find the owner of an email address, one of your options if you are getting non-stop spam emails is to report them by following the steps I explained in another post about reporting spam emails.

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