Business Email Permutator

Find the most likely work address for a person from their name and company domain. This free permutator builds 22 common corporate email formats, removes duplicates, orders the list by a practical convention heuristic, and lets you copy one address or the whole set. Everything runs in your browser, so the names you enter are never uploaded or stored.

What is a business email permutator?

A business email permutator builds a shortlist of likely work addresses from three facts: a person’s first name, their last name and the company domain. Companies do not publish their internal address convention, so the tool reconstructs the formats most organisations choose from — first.last, firstlast, flast, first and the rest — and puts the most familiar ones first.

It is a research shortcut, not an address book. It cannot know which format a given employer uses, whether the person still works there, or whether the mailbox exists. Its job is to turn one name into a clean, ordered list you can test quickly instead of typing guesses by hand.

How to use this permutator

1. Type the person’s first name and last name. If you only have a full name, put it in the first field and leave the last name blank; the tool splits the first and last tokens.
2. Enter the company domain. A bare domain (northwind.io), a full URL or an existing email address all work; the domain is extracted and cleaned.
3. Choose a pattern set: Core for the six familiar formats, Common for fourteen, or All for the full catalogue of twenty-two.
4. Read the Candidates panel: the ring shows how many unique addresses were produced, the four tiles show how many patterns were tried, merged and skipped, and the meter shows the longest local part against the 64-character limit.
5. Use Copy on a single address, or Copy all addresses to get the whole list one per line.

The 22 patterns and how they are ranked

The ranking is an editorial order based on how often these conventions appear in everyday business correspondence. It is not a measured frequency study and should not be read as a probability. Treat the first row as the first guess, not the most likely address in a mathematical sense. The pattern-set selector controls how many blocks run: Core, Common or All.

Each block below is listed top to bottom in rank order.

Core: the six most familiar formats

Pattern	Example for Sara Chen at acme.io
first.last	[email protected]
firstlast	[email protected]
first	[email protected]
flast	[email protected]
first.l	[email protected]
first_last	[email protected]

Common: eight more formats

Pattern	Example for Sara Chen at acme.io
firstl	[email protected]
f.last	[email protected]
last.first	[email protected]
lastfirst	[email protected]
last	[email protected]
first-last	[email protected]
last_first	[email protected]
lfirst	[email protected]

All: the final eight formats

Pattern	Example for Sara Chen at acme.io
last.f	[email protected]
last-first	[email protected]
f_last	[email protected]
lastf	[email protected]
l.first	[email protected]
last_f	[email protected]
f-last	[email protected]
last-l	[email protected]

How names and domains are normalised

The tool lowercases everything, because addresses are case-insensitive in practice. Accented letters are transliterated to their base form, so José becomes jose and Müller becomes muller. Apostrophes and hyphens are removed when they join name parts, so O’Brien becomes obrien and Anne-Marie becomes annemarie. Extra spaces and punctuation are stripped. Digits are kept when the name also contains letters, because they are legal in a local part, and trailing suffixes such as Jr, Sr or III are dropped.

For the domain, the tool removes mailto:, anything before an @, a protocol such as https://, a leading www., and any path, query string or port. It then validates the result against hostname rules: labels of 1–63 characters, letters, digits and internal hyphens only, a real-looking ending, and a total length within the 253-character DNS limit. IP addresses, stray spaces and characters that are not allowed in a hostname are rejected outright, and a value without a domain ending is asked for the missing part instead.

Duplicate and invalid addresses

Some patterns collapse to the same string. A one-letter surname makes them collide: for Anne B, four of the twenty-two templates duplicate an address that already exists — firstl matches firstlast, l.first matches last.first, and so on — so eighteen unique addresses remain. A repeated name is more dramatic: Lee Lee yields only thirteen, because first.last and last.first are the same string. The tool keeps the highest-ranked version, counts the rest as merged, and never lists the same address twice. It also skips any address whose local part would start or end with a separator, contain a doubled separator, or exceed 64 characters, and any full address over 254 characters.

Why the domain matters more than the pattern

Most corporate mail servers accept a fixed set of local-part shapes. Guessing the right shape is only half the problem: the address also has to exist. A shortlist of 22 guesses sent to one domain is a lot of invalid recipients, and repeated invalid recipients can hurt the reputation of the sending domain. That is why the ranked order matters, why you should stop as soon as you confirm a hit, and why verification beats volume.

Consumer domains such as gmail.com or outlook.com are flagged in the status and the notes. Business patterns rarely apply there, and a personal mailbox is usually a worse contact route than a work address.

What this tool cannot do

• It cannot verify that an address exists. Nothing is sent, resolved or checked against a mail server.
• It cannot discover a company’s real convention from one name. If you have two or three known addresses at the same domain, the Email Pattern Detector is the better starting point.
• It does not know about aliases, distribution lists, shared inboxes or role addresses such as sales@.
• It cannot handle scripts outside the Latin alphabet. Accented Latin letters are transliterated (é becomes e), but a name written entirely in another script is rejected with a message rather than guessed at, so you must enter a Latin spelling yourself.
• It does not account for local conventions such as adding a middle initial, a team name or an office code.
• It cannot tell a catch-all domain from a real mailbox. Some servers accept every address, so even a verification service may return “unknown” and only a human confirmation settles it.

Using the results responsibly

Guessed addresses are a research input, not a contact list. Before sending anything, confirm the address through a source you trust, a verification service or a direct channel. Sending cold email to guessed addresses at scale produces bounces, complaints and, in many jurisdictions, legal exposure under privacy and anti-spam rules. The tool is designed for one person at a time, which is also the pace at which careful prospecting happens.

Frequently asked questions

Which email pattern is most common?

first.last is the most familiar convention in English-speaking corporate mail, followed by firstlast and first. That is why they lead the ranking. It is an editorial ordering, not a measured statistic, and plenty of companies use something else entirely.

Can I generate addresses for a whole list at once?

No. This page handles one person at a time by design. Bulk generation encourages volume sending to unverified addresses, which is the fastest way to damage a sending domain. Run each person through the tool and verify before contacting.

What if the company uses a country-specific domain?

Enter the exact domain that appears in the person’s email signature or on their regional site. A parent company’s global domain may not route mail to a local subsidiary, and the tool does not guess regional variants.

Why did I get fewer than 22 addresses?

The pattern set limits how many templates run: six for Core, fourteen for Common, twenty-two for All. Duplicates are merged, and any local part that breaks the 64-character or separator rules is skipped. The Tried, Unique, Merged and Skipped tiles show exactly where the difference came from.

Does the tool store or send the names I enter?

No. It is HTML, CSS and JavaScript running in your browser. There is no network request, no account, no cookie and no local storage, so nothing you type leaves the page.

What about accented names or apostrophes?

Accents are transliterated and apostrophes and hyphens are removed, because most mail systems do not accept them in a local part. If the employer uses a different transliteration, adjust the name manually and generate again.

Related tools

• Company name to domain finder — work out the domain before you build addresses on it
• Bulk domain cleaner — tidy a pasted list of company domains first
• Cold email subject line grader — check the message once you have a verified address

Next step

A guessed address is only useful if it becomes a real conversation. That is what mizanursguide.com helps with. See how we build B2B lead generation systems that pair verified contact data with outreach people actually answer.