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 "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 :)
@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.
@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.)
Hello there, I'm the owner at Thrust Division, a web development agency in London. I created this little tool as something to use on my own, and thought I would share it with the world for good spirit (and, I'll admit it, a little publicity...).
@giordanobd Hi Giordano! Curious, how is this different from Norbert? I just used Thrust and it gave me several different results for my query whereas Norbert only gave me one result for the same query. So that's one obvious difference. Are there any other differences?
@joshmuccio Hi Josh. Quite frankly I'm not sure how Norbert works. I tried it out on myself and didn't come up with anything, whereas thrust/mail works with my own domain (and most google apps domains).
It's true that it gives you multiple results sometimes. It doesn't choose one for you, but gives all the ones that exist, so I guess you have to use common sense to determine which one it is.
I put a link for facebook and twitter that performs a search for that email address. So if the “target” comes up, you got the right email. There is no an official API way to look up an user by email unfortunately (?)
@joshmuccio Hello :) I'm the maker of VoilaNorbert. Just wanted to let you know Norbert now display all the alternatives found, not just the first one.
@giordanobd Nice tool, welcome to the email finding community :) I tested it with my name (cyril nicodeme on reflectiv.net) and wasn't able to get any results whereas two were found on Norbert. I believe there is a few issue in your code you might want to check :-)
@cx42net Hi there, thank you for the welcome! Not sure why it doesn't find your email, quite frankly. But Norbert doesn't work with my email either, so maybe we can have a chat and improve both of our codes :)
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."
@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.
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?"
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!
@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.
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.
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..
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