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

Show HN: Little tool to find prospect's email address(thrust.io)

30 points by giordanobd 11 years ago | 16 comments

carrotleads 11 years ago |

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..

0tello 11 years ago |

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

bhartzer 11 years ago |

"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 ;)

MichaelCrawford 11 years ago |

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.

ilovefood 11 years ago |

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 !!

seanlevan 11 years ago | |

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.

growthape 11 years ago |

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.

lattejed 11 years ago |

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.

giordanobd 11 years ago | |

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.

lattejed 11 years ago | | |

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

ffumarola 11 years ago | |

It probes the MX records.

ashworth 11 years ago |

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

lwhalen 11 years ago |

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

growthape 11 years ago |

Interesting. Bookmarked!

corobo 11 years ago |

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

giordanobd 11 years ago |

Sorry for downtime. Currently resizing server.