Show HN: Little tool to find prospect's email address | Hacker News Reader

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

thrust.io

30 pointsgiordanobd16 comments

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..

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

"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 ;)

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.

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 !!

Hi, you said on my chatbot ACUMAN that you would be willing to help, and that you made a similar service at age 17. BTW I'm 14 years old.

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.

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.

If it produces an email it is pretty accurate. It checks various possibilities, and returns the valid ones. If only one is returned you can be pretty sure it is a valid email. You can use the social links to see if the email is associated to a facebook / twitter account.

It does check that the domain is not "catch-all", or that it doesn't simply ignore our queries.

Yeah, it returned exactly one email that's likely (in my opinion) to be correct. That's really cool. Thanks.

It probes the MX records.

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

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

Interesting. Bookmarked!

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

Sorry for downtime. Currently resizing server.

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