Interesting that this is the only blog post on this site, must be brand spanking new.
It is. I'm planning to put out more stuff like this over time. Any feedback is welcome!
Finding Anyone’s Email Address
21–30 of 32 posts
Re: Finding Anyone’s Email Address
#22This counts as a hack now?
Apparently everything is a hack, and anything can be hacked. Hack your life, hack weight loss, hack cooking. It's ridiculous; I'm glad I never really used the words hacker or hack, as they seem to have lost all semblance of meaning in the last year or so.
Re: Finding Anyone’s Email Address
#23You can collapse all these into one step - find an organization they are associated with (like their employer), and take the formats (Johnd@, jdoe@ etc). Stick one into the "To" field, and the remaining into the BCC field. You'll end up with about 8 email addresses total, and 7 will bounce. This works 95% of the time. Caveat - its probably a bit spammy but the folks I learned this from have to my knowledge never been…
Or none will bounce, one or two might get to someone and the rest will be captured and used to automatically mark you as a spammer.
Re: Finding Anyone’s Email Address
#24You can collapse all these into one step - find an organization they are associated with (like their employer), and take the formats (Johnd@, jdoe@ etc). Stick one into the "To" field, and the remaining into the BCC field. You'll end up with about 8 email addresses total, and 7 will bounce. This works 95% of the time. Caveat - its probably a bit spammy but the folks I learned this from have to my knowledge never been…
Or none will bounce, one or two might get to someone and the rest will be captured and used to automatically mark you as a spammer.
Interesting - all I've seen when I've used this technique in the past is emails bouncing. Will keep an eye out for this.
Re: Finding Anyone’s Email Address
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or none will bounce, one or two might get to someone and the rest will be captured and used to automatically mark you as a spammer.
Interesting - all I've seen when I've used this technique in the past is emails bouncing. Will keep an eye out for this.
I actively do this. Typically when someone is just trying dozens of permutations of my email addresses they aren't someone I want to talk to or are trying to sell me something.
Re: Finding Anyone’s Email Address
#26This counts as a hack now?
Apparently everything is a hack, and anything can be hacked. Hack your life, hack weight loss, hack cooking. It's ridiculous; I'm glad I never really used the words hacker or hack, as they seem to have lost all semblance of meaning in the last year or so.
My thoughts exactly. I wish we would go back to the original meaning of the word hack, as in "cut with rough or heavy blows." At least it would make it funny.
"Cut your life with rough or heavy blows!"
"Cut off your extra weight with rough or heavy blows!"
"Cut off that chicken you're cooking with rough or heavy blows!"
Re: Finding Anyone’s Email Address
#27You can collapse all these into one step - find an organization they are associated with (like their employer), and take the formats (Johnd@, jdoe@ etc). Stick one into the "To" field, and the remaining into the BCC field. You'll end up with about 8 email addresses total, and 7 will bounce. This works 95% of the time. Caveat - its probably a bit spammy but the folks I learned this from have to my knowledge never been…
Important to use a dummy email account for these purposes - you didn't mention this as it might be obvious, but the last thing you want to do is use this method with the email address you actually want to use to communicate with the person in question.
Re: Finding Anyone’s Email Address
#28The article gives pretty terrible advice. The advice is against the AUP / ToS of many service providers. The advice is borderline legal, depending on the receiver and on the content of the message.
And it's a shame, because all this stuff about spam is very old. We don't need to learn these lessons again.
Ask people to give you their email addresses, and ask if it's okay for you to send them stuff. Confirm that email address. Include an opt out with every email.
Re: Finding Anyone’s Email Address
#29You can collapse all these into one step - find an organization they are associated with (like their employer), and take the formats (Johnd@, jdoe@ etc). Stick one into the "To" field, and the remaining into the BCC field. You'll end up with about 8 email addresses total, and 7 will bounce. This works 95% of the time. Caveat - its probably a bit spammy but the folks I learned this from have to my knowledge never been…
Or none will bounce, one or two might get to someone and the rest will be captured and used to automatically mark you as a spammer.
Bingo. APC pulled the spam trick on me years ago. I filled out one of their warranty cards and I'm pretty sure I provided no email address (not wanting any spam). At the time I was catching all email addresses on my domain in one account and I got a pile of emails from APC with various permutations of my name as an email address -- email addresses that I never would have used or given to anyone even though I would receive any emails that were sent to them. Guess what company I'll never buy from again (the fact that their UPSs fail without any warning doesn't help, either).
Re: Finding Anyone’s Email Address
#30The article gives pretty terrible advice. The advice is against the AUP / ToS of many service providers. The advice is borderline legal, depending on the receiver and on the content of the message. And it's a shame, because all this stuff about spam is very old. We don't need to learn these lessons again. Ask people to give you their email addresses, and ask if it's okay for you to send them stuff. Confirm that email…
As far as the Aup/Tos for that you can roll your own Smtp. Besides borderline legal is borderline legal. And even things that aren't "legal" are not always prosecuted. Not thinking that someone sending out 5000 spam messages even is going to cause a big prosecution.
More importantly the issue here is the way the post says "a large email campaign". What is defined as "large"?
I don't think taking the time to compile 200 email addresses and send a personal email really is to big of a problem if you've taken the time to go to the effort of doing what the OP is saying (in other words you didn't just buy a list of names). On the other hand if you've gotten mechanical turks and mined 20,000 emails maybe it is.
I don't think (despite the definition) that "spam" is anything unsolicited anymore than calling someone by phone to try to get them to buy something is automatically the same as robo calling or cubicle calling.