Generate addresses
Bulk mode — apply one pattern to a list (for names × domains use the bulk permutator)
If you already know the company uses first.last, pick it and every row gets one address. Otherwise each row gets the pattern most companies of that kind use.
Generates candidates only. Whether a mailbox exists needs a server check — run the top guesses through the verifier.
How it works
Normalise
Names are lower-cased, accents stripped, and spaces and punctuation removed, because that is what mail admins do when they create accounts.
Generate
Twenty patterns are filled in — {first}.{last}, {first}, {f}{last}, {first}{last}, {first}_{last} and the rest — deduplicated, since some collapse for short names, and shown as a full table with the template next to each address.
Rank
Each pattern carries the share of companies that use it, from published corporate email-format data. The top three cover about two thirds of companies.
Check the domain
MX and A records are fetched so a typo'd or dead domain is caught before you verify anything, and free-mail domains are flagged because patterns do not apply there.
What a permutator is good for
You know a person's name and their company's domain, and you need the address. Most companies use one pattern for everyone, and most of those patterns come from a short list: first.last is the plurality, then first alone, then first-initial-plus-last. This tool lays out every plausible form, ranked by how often the pattern turns up across companies, so you verify three guesses instead of twenty. It is the manual, one-prospect version of what lead-data providers do at scale.
Why the ranking is a base rate, not a prediction
The percentages are how often each pattern appears across a large sample of company domains. They say nothing about Acme specifically. A single confirmed address at a company — from a signature, a press release, a reply — tells you the pattern for everyone else there, and that beats every percentage on the page. That is what the bulk mode is for: once you know a company uses flast, feed it the rest of the names and apply that pattern. Only fall back to the ranked guess when you have nothing.
The step this tool cannot do
Generating candidates costs nothing. Sending to them costs reputation. A guessed address that does not exist is a hard bounce, and a list of guessed addresses will bounce at whatever rate the pattern is wrong — typically twenty to sixty percent, against the two percent that Google and Microsoft start punishing at. Every candidate here has a Verify link that asks the mail server whether the mailbox exists, without sending anything. Do that before the address goes into a sequence. For catch-all domains, which accept every address and reveal nothing, the answer has to come from data that was verified another way.
Free-mail is where this breaks
Patterns are a corporate convention. On Gmail or Outlook.com, people take whatever local part was available in 2011, and guessing produces bounces against the largest reputation systems on the internet. The tool flags free-mail domains and stops short of pretending the ranking means anything there. If the only address you have for a B2B prospect is a Gmail one, the useful move is finding their work domain.
Frequently asked questions
How accurate are the pattern percentages?
They are base rates across companies, drawn from published email-format datasets. first.last is used by roughly 35–40% of companies, first by about 15%, flast by about 12%. Any one company uses one pattern; the ranking tells you where to look first.
Does this tell me whether the address exists?
No. It generates candidates. Existence needs an SMTP conversation with the domain's mail server — the Verify link next to each candidate does that without sending a message.
What about middle names or double-barrelled surnames?
Type the full first name with the middle name after it and the middle-initial patterns appear. For a hyphenated surname, try it both with the hyphen removed and with only the first part.
Can I generate for a whole list?
Yes — open bulk mode, paste First, Last, domain per line, and either pick a known pattern or let each row take the top-ranked guess. Up to 500 rows; the domains are MX-checked as a batch.
Is guessing addresses legal?
Generating an address is not regulated; sending to it is. Cold email to business addresses is lawful in most jurisdictions with the usual conditions — honest sender identity, an easy opt-out, no deception. Bouncing dozens of guesses is not a legal problem, just a deliverability one.
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The checks that most often follow this one.
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Monitoring & retainer
Infrastructure drifts. Records get edited, certificates expire, domains get listed. Ongoing eyes on the fleet.
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Start with a call
Bring a domain and the symptom. I will tell you what is actually wrong and whether you need me at all — plenty of people leave that call able to fix it themselves.
Thirty minutes, no pitch
We will run the checks together on your actual domains, and you will leave knowing what is broken, what it takes to fix, and what it should cost. If that is a job you can do in-house, I will say so.