Across 200 working professionals we scanned, the median person's work email appears in 11 out of 15 B2B sales databases. Sales and marketing leaders are in 14. Engineers are in 7. Almost nobody knew their email was listed anywhere - and almost everyone wanted out.
About six months ago, I had a question that wouldn't leave me alone: how many B2B databases is my work email actually in?
I knew it was in Apollo - I'd used Apollo myself as a marketer. I assumed it was probably in ZoomInfo too, and maybe Lusha. But beyond that, I had no idea. I'd never been told my contact info was added to any of them. I'd never agreed to any of it.
So I did what any reasonable person would do: I built a tool that checks all of them in one go, scanned my own inbox, then quietly asked 200 other professionals if I could scan theirs too. They said yes (with appropriate scope-limited Gmail permissions and signed agreements - we're not crazy). Here's what we found.
The headline number: 11.
We scanned for presence across Apollo, ZoomInfo, Lusha, Clay, RocketReach, Hunter.io, Seamless.AI, Snov.io, Kaspr, Clearbit, SalesIntel, UpLead, Cognism, Lead411, and a fifteenth we don't name publicly because they're litigious and small.
The variance was huge depending on role.
By role, this gets worse.
Some roles are basically catnip to B2B database scrapers. Anyone in a buying role for technology, anyone with budget authority, anyone whose LinkedIn says "Director" or above. Here's the breakdown:
| Role type | Median databases | Worst case |
|---|---|---|
| Founders / CEOs | 15 / 15 | 15 / 15 |
| VP Sales / CRO | 14 / 15 | 15 / 15 |
| VP Marketing / CMO | 14 / 15 | 15 / 15 |
| Head of RevOps | 13 / 15 | 15 / 15 |
| Director (any) | 12 / 15 | 14 / 15 |
| Manager (any) | 10 / 15 | 13 / 15 |
| Individual contributor (sales) | 9 / 15 | 12 / 15 |
| Engineer / Designer / IC (non-sales) | 7 / 15 | 11 / 15 |
| Customer Success / Support | 6 / 15 | 10 / 15 |
If you're a founder, your contact info is everywhere. We scanned 23 founders in our cohort - every single one was in all 15 databases. The math is brutal: at typical SDR cadences (3 emails over 2 weeks per outreach), being listed in 15 databases means you're getting roughly 45 cold pitches per week just from these tools, ignoring all other sources.
That's not a "they found me somehow" problem. That's an industrialized data supply chain.
How does this even happen.
The honest answer: nobody adds you to a B2B database on purpose. Your email gets scraped, inferred, or merged into one. It usually starts in one of three ways:
- Email pattern inference. Apollo's algorithm sees that your company uses
firstname@company.comfor one person, and then guesses every other employee follows the same pattern. They confirm via SMTP ping. You're in. - LinkedIn data enrichment. Tools like Clay and Hunter use your public LinkedIn profile, match it to your company domain, then guess + verify your email. No permission asked, none required.
- Cross-database licensing. Once one database has you, they often license that data to others. You get added to 5 databases in one week, even though you only "leaked" in one.
No one chooses to be in these databases. You just are.
The "how would I even know" problem
Of the 200 people we scanned, here's what they thought before we showed them the data:
- 83% knew they were "probably in Apollo or ZoomInfo"
- 34% had specifically heard of Lusha or Clearbit
- Less than 5% had heard of Kaspr, SalesIntel, or Lead411
- Nobody knew they were in all 15
This is the thing that gets me. Apollo and ZoomInfo are loud - they advertise, they get covered in tech press, you can guess they have you. But the other 13? They operate completely below the radar. They sell your contact info to thousands of SDR teams, and you have no idea they exist until you start digging.
One person in our cohort - a VP of Engineering at a mid-size SaaS company - asked us to scan her inbox because she "kept getting weird cold emails from no-name companies." We found her in 12 databases. The "weird cold emails" were SDRs at those databases' customer companies, hitting her with personalized openers based on her tech stack (which the database also tracks, separately).
Does opting out work.
Mostly yes, eventually. Apollo processes removal requests within 14 days under GDPR/CCPA. ZoomInfo within 30. Lusha and Hunter within a week. RocketReach in a few days, though it sometimes re-adds you within a month.
That re-adding thing is the catch. Removal isn't permanent unless something else changes - your company hires a new SDR who triggers a fresh scrape, your LinkedIn updates, your email pattern leaks again in some unrelated context. We saw 22% of people who'd previously opted out of one database get re-added within 60 days.
This is why I built Inbox Nanny in the first place. Opt out once and you're fine for a quarter. Opt out continuously and you're actually free. More on why this matters here.
What I'd do if I were you.
If you've read this far, you probably want to know how many databases you're personally in. Three options:
- Manually check the big three. Go to
privacy@apollo.io, ZoomInfo's opt-out form, and Lusha's data request page. Submit removal requests. Most of the time this catches 80% of your exposure. - Use a free scanner. Honestly, you can do this with Inbox Nanny in 30 seconds at no cost (no card required). We'll show you exactly which databases have you and roughly how often you're being sourced from each. Free scan here.
- Use the paid version if you actually want it handled - we send the removal requests from your own Gmail (so they're treated as legitimate data subject requests under GDPR/CCPA) and keep watching for re-listings. Pricing here.
The single most important number to know is your starting count. Once you see "you're in 11 databases," everything else becomes a tractable problem instead of a vague anxiety.
Be in fewer databases. Get less spam. Pretty simple, honestly.
Find out your number.
Connect Gmail. The nanny scans you against all 15 databases. Free, takes 30 seconds, no card.