Sourcers and recruiters are always looking for different, easier and more effective ways of divining the email addresses of people they are looking to engage.

While there are many ways of researching, guessing, and verifying valid email addresses, did you know you can find almost anyone’s email address using Gmail?

I didn’t, until I stumbled across a very interesting post in the blog section of Distilled.net, the website of a PPC/SEO consultancy, and they demonstrate quite clearly how to find almost anyone’s email address using Gmail and Rapportive.

The technique is so simple and effective that I wanted to share it with the global sourcing and recruiting community.

Here is the original post, and below you can view the YouTube video that demonstrates how to use Gmail, Rapportive, and a Google Doc email permutator to reveal and confirm email addresses.

I highly recommend that you view the video in full screen mode and change the quality to 720p.

Of course, in order for you to leverage this method of email divination, you will need a Gmail account and the Rapportive plugin for Gmail. It would also certainly help to use an email permutator to quickly generate all of the most common email address formats, and the Google Doc spreadsheet created by Rob Ousbey from Distilled.net is the best I’ve seen so far.

If you’re not already using Rapportive, you should be. In addition to rewarding you with verifying correctly guessed email addresses, Rapportive imbues Gmail with some social CRM functionality, allowing you to see recent social activity, follow people on popular social networks (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc.), and even leave notes about specific people to use in future interactions.

As an added bonus, here is yet another blog post written by a non-sourcer/recruiter on how to find anyone’s email address, which details the Gmail/Rapportive technique, as well as MailTester.com, Jigsaw/Data.com, and a few other methods, including calling and asking.

Imagine that!

:)