Show HN: Find any email address on the web • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: Find any email address on the web

#21

Post by novium » Thu, Sep 01, 2016, 1:52 PM UTC

beeker87 wrote: post #8

jventura wrote: post #5

So you have a tool to find emails, something that scammers and spammers may use, and the first thing you ask on your website is for my email address?! How trustful is that?

We only track emails that have been publicly posted on the web. Using emails that have been submitted to us through our signup form would obviously be a huge violation of privacy. We don't do this, and we never will. You can view our privacy policy here https://maildb.io/privacy

On the topic of tracking emails that are "publicly posted on the web", how are you then making sure that the emails have been published with consent and don't originate in sources like database dumps etc.? As it does still sound somewhat unethical to use emails that aren't published with consent.

Re: Show HN: Find any email address on the web

#22

Post by niccolop » Thu, Sep 01, 2016, 2:15 PM UTC

beeker87 wrote: post #18

lighttower wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes, I do spend a lot of time finding emails. as a startup founder I did much of my sales development over email / linkedin. I learned the quirks of several search engines - and made it work. Bing was the best. Google, ironically, the worst. This service is something I'd be interested in for sure.

Awesome. Our goal is to create a quality, enterprise level piece of software, which is affordable for everyone and actually makes sense to use given the price point and benefits. If you ever want to talk about business/startups or anything, send me an email.

I'm also curious to try it out... I spend all day searching for emails.

Re: Show HN: Find any email address on the web

#23

Post by andwur » Thu, Sep 01, 2016, 2:17 PM UTC

If you're relying on crawlers to build your database how do you plan on dealing with spam traps? I see you have a verification aspect to your service but from what detail you have provided it would be incapable of distinguishing legitimate from trap.

Their presence in your lists could ultimately render the service useless as users risk blacklisting by contacting such addresses.

Re: Show HN: Find any email address on the web

#24

Post by beeker87 » Thu, Sep 01, 2016, 2:33 PM UTC

novium wrote: post #21

beeker87 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We only track emails that have been publicly posted on the web. Using emails that have been submitted to us through our signup form would obviously be a huge violation of privacy. We don't do this, and we never will. You can view our privacy policy here https://maildb.io/privacy

On the topic of tracking emails that are "publicly posted on the web", how are you then making sure that the emails have been published with consent and don't originate in sources like database dumps etc.? As it does still sound somewhat unethical to use emails that aren't published with consent.

Usually you'll see someone release site data, such as a database dump, via sites like pastebin. Either that or the release is zipped and hosted somewhere for download. We're most likely going to have crawler skip potentially risky sites, such as pastebin. Our crawler also will not have the ability to download and view actual files.

Also, we are probably going to implement specific pages that allow anyone to delist their domain and/or email address from our service.

Re: Show HN: Find any email address on the web

#25

Post by beeker87 » Thu, Sep 01, 2016, 2:46 PM UTC

andwur wrote: post #23

If you're relying on crawlers to build your database how do you plan on dealing with spam traps? I see you have a verification aspect to your service but from what detail you have provided it would be incapable of distinguishing legitimate from trap. Their presence in your lists could ultimately render the service useless as users risk blacklisting by contacting such addresses.

To be honest, we probably won't try and filter out spam traps. Our service is really meant to aid you in finding specific emails.

Given that, we will be implementing multiple verification and confidence checks for each email address. This is to help ensure a given email address is for a real person, with multiple legitimate web sources listing it, before you ever send a message.