How to find out who owns an email address.

The video above gives a quick look at three free options — SpyTox, ThatsThem, and SpyDialer — showing the kind of results each one returns. Here's a sample of what ThatsThem results can look like:

2025 update: A few more options have emerged since this was first posted, and the Google removal tool mentioned in the 2022 update has expanded significantly. More on both below. For a broader look at public records resources beyond email lookups, there's a dedicated post on that here.

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Free Ways to Look Up an Email Address Owner

The approach shown in the video (searching ThatsThem by email) still works. ThatsThem searches public records and can return a name, location, and phone number associated with an email address at no cost and with no account required. Results are better for addresses that have been used publicly in some way, thinner for purely private addresses.

A few other options worth knowing about:

• SpyTox — one of the three shown in the video. It searches for a name, address, phone number, and social profiles linked to an email address and claims to cover Gmail and Yahoo addresses specifically. It's worth noting that some recent user reviews describe the search form occasionally redirecting to the homepage rather than returning results, which can be frustrating. Basic searches are free but a full report requires payment. Results quality appears to be hit or miss based on current feedback.
• EmailSherlock — free, no signup, returns social profiles linked to an address along with a spam/trust score for the sender. Useful for quickly checking whether an address you've received mail from looks legitimate.
• Mailmeteor's reverse email tool — works best on professional or business email addresses. It can return a name, job title, company, and LinkedIn profile. Less useful for personal Gmail or Outlook addresses where there's no professional footprint to pull from.
• Google itself — still worth trying before anything else. Paste the email address into Google in quotation marks and see what comes up. Forum posts, social media profiles, business listings, and comment sections frequently tie an email to a real name, and it costs nothing.

One thing that hasn't changed: results are always going to be hit or miss. If someone has been careful about what they attach their email address to publicly, reverse lookup tools have very little to work with. These searches are most useful when the address has been used on forums, review sites, social media, or business listings.

What About Professional or Business Emails?

If the address follows a common business format (firstname.lastname@company.com, for example), you often don't need a lookup tool at all. Search the domain in Google to find the company, then search the name you've inferred from the address on LinkedIn. That combination will frequently get you further than any automated tool, especially for smaller companies where employees aren't indexed in people-search databases.

The Google "Results About You" Tool

The 2022 update to this post mentioned that Google had started letting you request removal of your own personal information from search results. That tool has grown considerably since then. As of 2025, Google's "Results About You" dashboard lets you monitor whether your name, address, phone number, email, and now even government IDs like passports and driver's licenses are appearing in search results, and request removal when they are. It can also run ongoing checks and alert you when new results surface.

The catch, which was alluded to in that original 2022 note, is still worth spelling out. Removing a result from Google doesn't remove the information from the website it came from. Anyone who knows where to look can still find it. As one privacy researcher put it, you're peeling off the first layer of information that's easy to find, which is genuinely useful for stopping casual snooping, but dedicated searching is another matter. The tool also does nothing about the data Google itself has on you, which is a separate issue entirely and a much harder one to address.

Still, for what it is, it's a free and reasonably useful tool. Worth setting up if you haven't already, particularly now that it covers government ID numbers in addition to basic contact information.