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Comment by CM30 | Hacker News Reader

It's an interesting idea, I'll say that much. A way to find email addresses associated with a certain domain is a pretty neat thing to have.

That said, isn't this a spam nightmare waiting to happen? I mean, if you give a spammer or two hundred access to this site, then all hell is gonna break loose (especially with popular websites that spammers and scumbags might want emails associated with).

And with your crawler taking email addresses from blogs, articles, comments and other such sources, it seems like this is a doxing tool just waiting to be used. It's not uncommon for people to post email addresses associated with those they don't like on a personal level, especially if they're in the middle of a large controversy (like say, the recent US elections).

I really hope you've figured out a way to avoid that side. And considered adding a way for sites to opt out (either on a domain level or an individual email address level).

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Thank you!

For spammers specifically, you're correct in that our service could possibly be used to gather emails by someone with the intention of spamming. This is true though really for any lead generation type service.

While we will be offering a free plan level, it will be very limited in terms of the number of emails you can find. In order to get more requests, there will be paid monthly plans. To be honest, the crawler part of our service is something sophisticated spammers have probably been doing for awhile now, and wouldn't see the benefit of paying for, for their specific uses.

With regards to the privacy concern, our crawler only finds emails that have been publicly posted. It also follows the standard rules expected of web crawlers today. For users to find emails, they must do so by a specific domain name, so for instance you couldn't just search for John Doe and find a Gmail address.

So you've taken something that only companies with large budgets were able to do, and made it possible for everyone?

Any way I can remove my email from your website in case a website I've signed up to hasn't hidden my email sufficiently?

What robots.txt rules do I add to protect my users in case emails get posted to my site in comments/posts?

Exactly, our goal is to make this service something affordable for everyone. The current solutions, imho, are charging an insane amount for what they offer.

We haven't discussed this yet but it seems like a good idea, so we'll probably have a page dedicated to this where users can tell us to remove their email from our database.

Once we're in beta, our crawler will operate under a specific name which you can refer to in your robots.txt exclusion rules. We'll have an info page for this.

Something to consider, how about having the ability to delist domains?

I have a few domains that I use as pre-spam filters so that I can see immediately if my email address was spammed. e.g., I receive an email addressed to sun.com@myhappydomain.com but it's advertising something along the lines of rutabaga hentai.

If I could remove myhappydomain.com completely, that would be a happy making thing.

Not a bad idea, could have it work on the same principles as the robot exclusion, but just have a simple web submission form for domains. To prevent malicious use, could maybe have it send a confirmation link for delisting to an email address associated with the domain.

We'll discuss this for beta, thank you!

Talking of Gmail, what are you going to do about those services?

Because letting people find emails associated with the gmail or yahoo domain would theoretically give you millions of results. Do you plan to delist any webmail service related domains?

And do you have any idea what to do if someone complains that their email isn't public but someone else has been posting it online (say, to let people attack them)?

Yes, our service will not return any webmail addresses such as Gmail, Yahoo, MSN, and the like.

We will most likely have a specific page which lets users delist their email.

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