How do you find out a company's email address format?

A single real address at the company is enough to deduce it. You will find one in the legal notice, on a contact page, in a press release, a trademark filing, a signature published in a PDF, or a trade directory. The format you observe then applies to the other people, and every address you build must be verified.

Can a company use several formats at the same time?

Yes. It is frequent after a merger, a change of mail provider or the arrival of a subsidiary. Long-standing employees sometimes keep the old format while new accounts are created in the new one. In that case you have to test several templates, person by person.

Is the email domain always the website domain?

No, and this is the leading cause of a failed search. A company whose site is on company-group.com may receive its email on company.fr. You have to check which domain carries a mail server, and look for public addresses on both.

How do you handle compound first names and names with a particle?

Jean-Marc Lagarde can become jean-marc.lagarde, jm.lagarde, j-m.lagarde or jeanmarc.lagarde. Marie de la Chevalerie can become m.delachevalerie, m.chevalerie or marie.de-la-chevalerie. You have to try the plausible variants rather than a single form, otherwise someone who is there gets declared unreachable.

A company's email address format, and how to find it

A company creates its addresses from a single template, almost always the same one for all staff. Identify that template, then the right domain, and you can rebuild the address of any employee.

By Bertrand Menesguen, founder of Créacodeal · Updated : 2026-09-16

The most common formats

Seven templates cover almost every French company. The first one on its own accounts for more than half of them.

Template	Example	Notes
`[email protected]`	[email protected]	By far the most common in France, especially above twenty employees.
`[email protected]`	[email protected]	Frequent in smaller companies and professional firms. A source of name clashes.
`[email protected]`	[email protected]	Very small businesses, agencies, tradespeople.
`[email protected]`	[email protected]	Common in industry and in English-speaking groups.
`[email protected]`	[email protected]	Rare, and unworkable as soon as there are two Martins.
`[email protected]`	[email protected]	International groups: the domain changes, the format does not.
`[email protected]`	[email protected]	A minority, often inherited from an old hosting provider.

The method, in order

Find the right domain. The website domain is not always the mail domain. A domain can only receive email if it carries MX records. If the website domain has none, the mail lives elsewhere, and you need to find where before building anything.
Find one real address, a single one is enough. Legal notice, contact page, press release, job posting, trademark filing, published PDF, trade directory.
Deduce the template and generalize it. An address such as [email protected] gives you firstname.lastname. The template holds for the whole company, apart from the exceptions described below.
Verify every address you build. The template stays a hypothesis until the mail server has confirmed it. See verification without sending.

What makes the deduction fail

The mail domain is not the website domain

This is trap number one, and it is a silent one: every address built on the wrong domain comes back as nonexistent, which gives the impression that the company cannot be found when the template was in fact right. Real cases we have run into: a site on company-group.com whose mail runs on company.fr, a site on .com whose mail is on .eu, a European subsidiary that writes from the group domain.

Splitting names

Compound first names, names with a particle, double family names and accents produce several possible forms for the same template. Accents always disappear, spaces become a hyphen or nothing. A serious search tests the variants rather than a single spelling.

Generic addresses and aliases

contact@, info@, commercial@, rh@ are shared mailboxes: they verify as valid but they do not lead to a person. They remain useful as a last resort, never as the main target of a personalized message.

Changes of mail provider

After a migration, the old template often stays active as a redirect for months. Two formats can therefore answer valid for the same person. The more recent one is the right one.

Automating without getting it wrong

Generalizing one template across a whole list of companies multiplies the errors: every company has its own. Veriphee tackles the problem the other way around: for each company it first determines which domain actually receives the email, then learns the template by verifying a first person, and then applies that confirmed template to the other decision-makers. If the first hypothesis is wrong, other templates are tried until an address answers.

Frequently asked questions

How do you find out a company's email address format?: A single real address at the company is enough to deduce it. You will find one in the legal notice, on a contact page, in a press release, a trademark filing, a signature published in a PDF, or a trade directory. The format you observe then applies to the other people, and every address you build must be verified.
Can a company use several formats at the same time?: Yes. It is frequent after a merger, a change of mail provider or the arrival of a subsidiary. Long-standing employees sometimes keep the old format while new accounts are created in the new one. In that case you have to test several templates, person by person.
Is the email domain always the website domain?: No, and this is the leading cause of a failed search. A company whose site is on company-group.com may receive its email on company.fr. You have to check which domain carries a mail server, and look for public addresses on both.
How do you handle compound first names and names with a particle?: Jean-Marc Lagarde can become jean-marc.lagarde, jm.lagarde, j-m.lagarde or jeanmarc.lagarde. Marie de la Chevalerie can become m.delachevalerie, m.chevalerie or marie.de-la-chevalerie. You have to try the plausible variants rather than a single form, otherwise someone who is there gets declared unreachable.