SKILL / Identity
Plans: Pro & AgencyPublic Email Discovery
Find explicitly published email addresses and preserve their attribution and publication context without guessing addresses.
Read the step-by-step user guidePublic Email Discovery is the Nexus Skill for a narrow but frequent question: which email addresses has this person or organization actually published, and where? Nexus finds addresses that appear explicitly in public sources — contact pages, filings, bylines, project pages, published documents — and records for each one who it is attributed to and the context in which it was published. The investigator receives published occurrences to verify against the source before using them in an assessment.
What you get
Published email addresses attributed to the subject, each with the page and context in which it appeared.
Using Public Email Discovery in an investigation
Each address in the result is classified by attribution: personal, professional, role-based (such as a press or support mailbox) or organizational. That distinction matters, because a role-based address on a company site says something different from a personal address in a conference program. Nexus also keeps the publication context — the page where the address appeared and how it was presented — so the investigator can judge whether it was offered as a business contact, listed by a third party or reproduced from an older source. Where an address appears with conflicting attribution, the conflict is recorded rather than resolved silently.
A published address is a strong pivot. From the case, an investigator can take a supported address into Breach Exposure Search to check authorized exposure records, into Public-Source Research to see where else the address appears, or into the relationship graph as an identifier linked to the person or organization. Because Public Email Discovery only reports what was actually published, the addresses it finds can be cited directly in a BLUF Situation Brief or PDF report with their source, without the caveats that a guessed address would demand.
Example objectives
Run the Skill directly, or describe the objective in your own words — these are the kinds of questions it is built to answer.
Ask Nexus
“Which email addresses has this consultancy published on its own site and in public filings, and which are role-based mailboxes?”
Ask Nexus
“Find any email address publicly attributed to the subject in bylines, conference programs or project pages, with the source for each.”
Ask Nexus
“Is the address quoted in this complaint actually published anywhere in connection with the person it is attributed to?”
How Public Email Discovery fits the investigation
A Skill is one move inside a case. The findings stay in the case file, where the evidence behind them can be checked, graphed and reported.
- 01
Choose or describe
Pick the Skill from the Skill Library, or describe the objective in your own words and let Nexus work out which Skills fit the question.
- 02
Review the evidence
Open the evidence record behind any finding and read the original public source before you rely on what it says.
- 03
Add to the case graph
Promote the people, organizations and identifiers you accept into the case relationship graph, straight from their evidence records.
- 04
Brief and report
Turn the case into a BLUF situation brief and, on Pro and Agency, into a structured PDF report with chain of custody.
Evidence before conclusions
What Public Email Discovery cannot establish
Nexus keeps supported findings, possible matches, contradictions and information gaps apart instead of blending them into one narrative. These are the boundaries Public Email Discovery states up front.
- Public Email Discovery reports only addresses explicitly present in retrieved public sources; Nexus never generates or guesses likely address patterns.
- A published address does not establish who owns or has access to the mailbox, and Nexus does not check whether an address is deliverable.
- An address that is not found may still exist; the result records an information gap, not confirmation that the subject has no published address.
Best for
Teams that reach for Public Email Discovery most often.
Related OSINT concepts
The vocabulary this Skill works in, defined in the glossary.
Related Skills
Skills investigators commonly run next, in the same case.
Frequently asked questions
Does Public Email Discovery guess email addresses?
Public Email Discovery does not guess email addresses; it reports only addresses explicitly present in the public sources Nexus retrieved, and each one is attributed to the page and context where it appeared. Nexus does not generate likely patterns such as first.last@company, does not attempt to confirm whether a mailbox exists and does not access private mailboxes. That is deliberate: a guessed address cannot be cited as evidence, while a published one can.
What does attribution mean in a Public Email Discovery result?
Attribution in a Public Email Discovery result records who a published address is presented as belonging to and in what capacity. Nexus distinguishes personal addresses, professional addresses tied to a named individual, role-based mailboxes such as press or support, and organizational addresses. Each label is backed by the source where the address appeared. Attribution describes what the source claims; it does not establish who currently controls the mailbox.
Which Nexus plan includes Public Email Discovery?
Public Email Discovery is included from the Nexus Pro plan upward, which makes Pro the plan to choose when published-contact research needs every address preserved with its source and attribution rather than copied from a browser tab. Pro at €59 per month covers 43 of the 47 investigative Skills; Agency at €89 per month covers all 47 and adds end-to-end encrypted investigation notes.
Is Public Email Discovery suitable for lawful outreach research?
Public Email Discovery supports lawful outreach research because it returns only addresses an organization or individual has published, together with the context of publication. That context lets a team see whether an address was offered as a business contact or appears in an unrelated setting. Nexus does not verify deliverability or consent, so users remain responsible for applying the privacy and marketing rules that govern their jurisdiction and purpose.