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Added to my 'Tools to find people's emails' collection: http://www.producthunt.com/anuja...
Interesting. This only works if the person is using an email at the domain in question though. While you can find me at @ golocalapps.com, you can't find my partner because she uses one from the parent company. And a lot of our side projects just have a catchall for the domain feeding to one of us, or into a general support email box.
@golocalapps I know. Mostly it's small companies that have catch-all addresses, though. The founders tend to be accessible at small companies!
Is there any way to verify that the email returned corresponds to the person being asked for? For example, I think if I search for "John NotAValidLastName" at somecompany.com, then I'm likely to get john@somecompany.com as a result even though there's definitely no person with the searched for name at the company (and john@somecompany.com is some other John..)
@somecompany @lpolovets No, not really. You can check whether the email is associated to a facebook / twitter account by clicking the icons next to the email address. But thats about it..
I tried a few sample queries, including "taylor" at "lisnr.com", but all gave the same error:
> "The domain name you entered is not responding to our requests. Maybe it doesn't like us snooping around?"
@kicksopenminds It looks like your domain has a catch-all address. So it won't work for you, sorry :(
Entered 'Brian' and 'bufferapp.com' and got this error:
"We cannot determine whether the email exists or not because the email service has a catch-all address."
@brian_lovin No email finder app can get around that. It means you've got @bufferapp.com set to catch all emails, not just correct ones.
@brian_lovin @bufferapp @ryangum Yes, unfortunately there really isn't a way around that. At lest that can be put together shortly as a side project.
@giordanobd @brian_lovin Could you not test email patterns with tracking pixels and see which ones fire (or fire multiple times?). Would take longer and involve sending emails but I figure there must be a signal you could use that would test if a human opened (or even responded to) an email.
This is cool and works well. But it is ironically ugly for being the product of a "premium design agency." 2 minutes and a few small CSS tweaks makes a huge difference.
@netspencer You are right in fact. Will probably have to change things around a little :)
@netspencer "Before" looks much better, at least in the rectangles shown above. All the type is black (not grey), allowing clear and easy reading, and the fonts are larger as well. Even with glasses, the "After" sample is not readable at a glance. Excessive white space is fine when type is readable, but is wasteful when type could be larger. Don't forget that grey type must be displayed larger than it would be if black (not smaller!) in order for it to be more readable. I _do_ like the "Anymail finder" in lighter type, but that may be because it's still black :)
Just tested this out and it works well. Just enter the name and company domain and it will return the email address.
@erictwillis @amritachandra Can I suggest you try again? We had some issues with Google Apps earlier today. Now it should work, or tell you why it doesn't.
this is a game changer. Before now, I used an excel spreadsheet that would auto-populate a bunch of fields with the most common permutations of people's email addresses (FirstnameLastname, Firstname_Lastname, FirstinitialLastname, etc) and then paste them into an email draft. Then i'd use Rapportive to determine which one of the addresses was actually in use. Worked really well, but the process was clunky. This is much better!
@arturmakly Didn't know about that one, thanks. Another useful email finder is http://www.emailbreaker.com/
@arturmakly That one looks great too. I wish they used some kind of heuristic to get around catch-all domains. (It seems like many of us have it set up with a catch-all account to catch when people make typos in email addresses.)
@arturmakly @philipithomas We pushed a new version on VoilaNorbert that now shows all the emails found, not the first one :)
Very impressive! I ran 5 tests and had a 40% success rate. For the ones that "failed", one explained that there was a catch-all on that domain, the other was a fake test (I searched for a contributor to a news site who doesn't have an email address at that domain) and I'm not sure why the 3rd one failed.
Obviously I get the value, and it's a useful tool to find emails of people you don't know. But it's my belief it's this exact type of tool that will eventually make email fail, and let some new system take its place as a communication client. If anyone can find my email address instantly, then the crap will eventually overrun relevant because it'll get abused by people and systems that are doing it for the wrong reasons.
Can you share how this works? I tried even on my own email and was unable to find it.
@joshuaoxj It essentially checks several combinations of your first / last name @domain.com. Some mail servers are configured so you can't really check, or have a catch-all address, so we can't verify them.
If you tried it earlier, maybe try it again. We had to add a few servers because they get blacklisted for some time after a lot of people use the service.
@domain @giordanobd Thanks for sharing. Not sure why it didn't work for my own domain but I did try and find Ryan and Dick Costolo's email and it worked. Haha.
On the other side of this-- does anyone actively want to be _found_ by such a tool? I understand many businesses want to find people, but I can't imagine the majority of people want that.
Teachable