So, you want to find out who owns a Gmail account. If the owner has filled out their profile information, their full name would be attached to emails they send from this account, but not everyone does that. And perhaps you don’t have any emails from this person saved, but you still want to find out who the owner of an email address is.

Google doesn’t give you a way to look up information on Gmail account holders, which means you’ll need to find out who’s Gmail this is on your own. There’s obviously the direct approach, where you simply send that person an email and ask who they are. This can work fine if you recently received an email from the account and wondered who’s email is this.

Assuming the direct approach isn’t an option, there are a few other good ways to track down the owner of a Gmail account and find a Gmail address for someone. Here are the three best and how you can try them and you’ll be able to find out somebody’s email address.

Search the Gmail Address on Social Media

With the number of people that are on social media, there’s certainly the possibility that the owner of the Gmail account is, too. You can find people using an email address on the following social networks:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn

Facebook makes this process easiest, as you can just punch in the email address in the search bar and see if there’s a matching account. Twitter and LinkedIn don’t have the option to search by an email address, but you can allow them to access your email contacts to see if any of those contacts already have accounts. This means you could save the email address into your contacts, and then use that feature to see if there’s a match.

Unfortunately, Instagram doesn’t have the option to search by an email address, and the workaround mentioned above won’t work, either. Don’t bother trying to search by email address on that social network.

Do a Reverse Email Lookup

The social media route isn’t always effective when you want to find the owner of an email. After all, the person may not be on social media, and even if they are, there’s no guarantee that they used their Gmail account to register for their social media accounts.

A reverse email lookup is a great way to find someone’s name by email address without jumping through any hoops or spending too long on the search. FreeBackgroundCheck.org has type of search available. Here’s how you can use it:

  1. Visit the site’s homepage and next to the “Find Records Fast” header, click Email to switch to that search type.
  2. Type in or copy and paste the Gmail address and perform the search.
  3. After FreeBackgroundCheck.org has gone through its records and located more information on the email address, you’ll be able to view a detailed report with everything it has on the email account and the account holder.

The search process only takes a few seconds, and FreeBackgroundCheck.org sorts through a wide range of data from all over the web and even the deep web. This makes it easy to conduct a free reverse email lookup online.

Use the Gmail Address for Keyword Searches

This method can be hit or miss, but it’s quick and it can be good to try multiple angles to see what information comes up. All you need to do is go to a search engine and try some different keyword searches using the email address. You can start by searching for just the email address, but after that, you may want to add in other keywords if you have any other info on the account holder.

Sometimes people post their email address online and you can find more info on them from these posts and it makes it easy to find out someone’s email address. Or they could have accounts where the email address is publicly tied to it.

Even though Google may be the most popular search engine on the planet, don’t make the mistake of only using that. Other search engines can sometimes pull up different search results that you wouldn’t have seen otherwise.

Where to Start Your Search

If you want to figure out the owner of the Gmail account or find out who emailed you as quickly as possible, your best option is a site that lets you do an email lookup, such as the aforementioned FreeBackgroundCheck.org. You will also likely get quite a bit of information on the account holder, as that site pulls up information from the public record and other sources to put together its reports.

Social media is also a valuable tool that may provide you with information you wouldn’t see through a background check site. A background check can give you quite a few details on a person, but if they’re active on social media, that will be a better way of learning about who they are.

Those two methods tend to be more effective than using search engines, but occasionally search engines can prove useful here. Give them a try if you want more information or if the previous methods haven’t been successful for you.