Email Permutator & Format Finder

A permutator is only useful because the patterns are not equally likely. Sixteen unordered guesses is homework; the same sixteen in frequency order is a two-minute job, because the first three cover most organisations you will ever look up.

first.last@ is the default almost everywhere, for a reason: it is unambiguous, survives a second person with the same first name, and reads as a real company. first@ dominates at companies under about twenty people, then quietly breaks the day a second Sam arrives. flast@ clusters at older and larger organisations, where it was chosen when mailbox names had length limits and never revisited.

Every one of these beats testing a permutation, and three of them take under a minute. Once you know the pattern for one person at a company, it almost always holds for everyone else.

A permutator that just concatenates strings produces confident nonsense on perfectly ordinary names. This one handles the common cases, and it is worth knowing which they are.

Accents and diacritics. Mail systems overwhelmingly fold to ASCII, so Ramón García becomes ramon.garcia@, not the accented form. Internationalised addresses exist in the standard but are rare in corporate use. Hyphens and apostrophes. O’Neill and Smith-Jones are normally stripped rather than kept — oneill@, smithjones@ — though a minority of companies keep the hyphen. Multi-part surnames. van der Berg may appear as vandenberg, berg, or v.d.berg; the last word is the safest single guess. Name order. In much of East Asia the family name is written first; if you have the name from a local source, check which part is the surname before you permute.

This is the part cold-outreach guides skip. Every message you send to an address that does not exist is a hard bounce, and hard bounces are the clearest signal a mailbox provider has that a sender is working from a list rather than a relationship. Enough of them and your mail stops reaching the inboxes of people whose addresses *were* correct.

The discipline is simple. Test candidates from a secondary domain, never your main sending one. Verify before any volume — a server-side verifier costs a fraction of a cent per address and answers the one question a browser tool cannot. And keep the ratio sane: a campaign where a quarter of the addresses were permutator output is not an outreach campaign, it is a bounce test with a message attached.

Already have a pile of addresses to sort out instead? The email list cleaner strips duplicates and role inboxes first, and the email extractor pulls addresses out of whatever you already have.