from Hacker News

Show HN: Little tool to find prospect's email address

by giordanobd on 2/23/15, 10:53 AM with 16 comments

  • by carrotleads on 2/23/15, 11:24 AM

    I would use a tool like this as our product does need hustling tools.

    I used my own email id(plus a few more) and my actual email wasn't in search results. Looks like they just do standard string combinations.

    Our aim is to source publicly available information and build a profile of a prospect for use by our clients. Maybe I am missing something and if I could see an explanation of their process that would engender more trust in their results.

    Back to writing my own data mining tools..

  • by 0tello on 3/3/15, 1:18 PM

    Cute, I assume it start SMTP sessions with different cobinations and checks if the server does not return an error after corresponding RCPT TO. It will not work with "catch-all" servers. Hint for inproovement - so far it does not find emails with numbers like John123@gmail.com

  • by bhartzer on 3/3/15, 1:13 AM

    "We cannot determine whether the email exists or not because the email service has a catch-all address." So, if you don't want to be found if someone uses that tool, then make sure you set up a catch-all address ;)

  • by MichaelCrawford on 2/23/15, 10:35 PM

    You Da Man!

    I am particularly good at debugging, and I greatly enjoy it, but it is quite uncommon that I am offered purely debugging jobs.

    I've had the idea of scouting around for well-financed programs that totally suck, then contacting their publishers to offer my service of fixing their broken code.

    I haven't had any bites yet. Your service is very encouraging to me.

  • by ilovefood on 2/23/15, 11:08 AM

    This tool is amazing! I think it works kind of like this: it splits firstname and lastname, tests for a response code on some random combination like "firstletterOfFirstName + last name" on a service like this http://verify-email.org/ very clever !!

  • by growthape on 2/23/15, 11:50 AM

    Its very very similar to this tool that I use to find journalists email ID's. https://www.voilanorbert.com/

    But mostly email addresses this tool predicts are not true.

  • by lattejed on 2/23/15, 11:03 AM

    Without giving too much away, how does this work and / or how reliable is it?

    I was actually looking around for <famous VC>'s email and it produced one for me.

  • by ashworth on 2/23/15, 11:12 AM

    =/ It produced inaccurate results for myself and a few coworkers/friends. (both public domains like gmail/yahoo and corporate emails)

  • by lwhalen on 2/24/15, 7:11 AM

    Aaaand my little catch-all mailbox and receive-rule renders this tool useless. Most excellent, less spam for me :)

  • by growthape on 2/23/15, 11:02 AM

    Interesting. Bookmarked!

  • by corobo on 2/23/15, 11:29 AM

    "Whoops, looks like something went wrong." oh dear :(

  • by giordanobd on 2/23/15, 11:44 AM

    Sorry for downtime. Currently resizing server.