Eight Ways to Guess and Verify Email Addresses

Suppose you are determined to find someone’s email address. With the new LinkedIn InMail policy, some say, this may happen in their practice more often. The post below outlines top eight ways to figure that email address out,starting with a list of guesses.

Before we go there: as the creator of one of the most popular email-finding techniques Rob Ousbey says,

With great power, comes great responsibility.

Let’s keep that in mind! (Don’t spam anyone.)

To find someone’s email address, you can try to come up with a number of guesses, using “email permutators”, known email formats for employers, and, perhaps, your imagination. For larger companies, try this custom search engine to find company email formats.

Note #1: Researching company email formats deserves a separate blog post; I am not covering it here in any detail.

Note #2: The eight verification techniques listed below can work with whole lists of guesses. Verifying just one or two email addresses can be done in some additional ways; that would be the subject of yet another blog post (coming soon).

Once you have a list of email address guesses, here are the eight ways to try and pinpoint the correct address. These eight methods all work in different ways, so if you are not successful with one, you can try another and you may succeed. Each of the 8 ways is quick to try; all are free except the last one.

1. Find emails with Rapportive (by Rob Ousbey). LinkedIn recently changed Rapportive , so this technique is less powerful now: it won’t cross-reference against any Social Networks, other than LinkedIn, any longer. But the technique still works, by finding the LinkedIn profile registered with the correct address, if the profile exists.
2. Find Almost Anybody’s Email Address with #LinkedIn: this, actually, works differently from Rob’s technique. This is dynamic cross-referencing; Rapportive provides cross-referencing against stored information, which can, in some cases, be incomplete or outdated. It’s pretty reliable and provides up-to-date information.
3. Find Almost Anyone’s Email Using MS Outlook: this technique will check email address guesses against LinkedIn, Facebook, and possibly XING, depending on your Outlook version.
4. Uploading a list of emails to Gmail will identify those with Google-plus accounts. Unfortunately, this is not 100% reliable in our experience, meaning, it may miss the correct profile even if it exists; it’s still worth a try, of course.
5. The post Find People on Google-Plus by Emails  has a few more relevant hints.
6. Uploading a list of emails to Gmail will let you to cross-reference them on Twitter. This will not work with large lists, as our experience shows, but will work just fine with a few dozen email guesses.
7. You can verify a list of email guesses against Facebook. This option is not easy to find! On the page Invite Your Friends locate the link “Import your email addresses” and point to a text file with a list of emails. No worries, you can use it without inviting anyone. Cancel all the invites – and see which email address is right. Note that if you work with a larger volume of addresses to verify (say, for several people at once) and wanted to look at the imported list in detail, the page Manage Contacts is not that helpful, but exporting your Facebook data would be. In the exported data you will clearly see the addresses which have and have not been identified as belonging to members. (I guess there’s another blog post this can be expanded into.) The downside to exporting is that you can’t select only some data to download, so you’ll have to get a complete archive.
8. Finally, tools like Mailtester.com provide free email checking for one address at a time. They “ping” email servers without sending an actual email. We know that they only work with some email servers. Checking email lists using that technique is offered by a good number of vendors for a price; I have not used that, so my comments will be minimal. Aaron Lintz has pointed me to this site as a good one.

Thanks to irina for Great Post....

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Find Almost Anyone’s Email Using MS Outlook

Find Almost Anyone’s Email Using MS Outlook

In the following post I am going to explain how to easily and quickly test all of the guesses for a person’s email address all at once using MS Outlook.

MS Outlook has an add-on called Social Connector. I have Outlook 2013 and the Social Connector is built in; for this latest version you need to turn it on. For earlier Outlook versions you need to add it which is easily done.

You can then connect Outlook with your LinkedIn and Facebook accounts and (depending on the version) with other social sites. I was able to add XING to my Outlook.

Here’s How to Find Almost Anyone’s Email Address.

The example below is for a “sample” person with the common name David Smith who works at Microsoft.

I am starting off by generating a list of guesses for the email address (or, perhaps, several email addresses) for the person. As a sample list of guesses I am trying variations of the email using @microsoft.com and several free email provider extensions such as gmail, yahoo, hotmail, and aol.

Note: These email guesses I am using are not “optimal” for a case like this; you are on your own to set a list of guesses. Ideas and templates are welcome; please share. What I am going to explain is how to test the guesses out all at once.

Step 1. Create a list of guesses for the email address and save in a csv file: 

Step 2. Import into Outlook pointing to these values in the file to be imported as email addresses:

Step 3. Here is what the list look like after importing. You can see the email addresses that have been identified on each of the networks!

The identified LinkedIn profiles stand out, having a little blue “in” on the pictures.

Your being connected with the people with the given addresses doesn’t affect the identification; it always works; or let’s say, it works the same for everyone.

Have you read the post up to here?  Here are a couple of notes on relevant previous blog posts that you may have thought of.

1) Correct, you know how to find email addresses using Rapportive. It’s explained in the great post Find (Almost) Anybody’s Email Address | Distilled along with an excel table that helps to generate a list of guesses for the email addresses at  bit.ly/name2email.

The above way is different. It’s better in some cases – and faster- because:

- it looks the email addresses up vs. looking up in the acquired data (as Rapportive does). This is more up-to-date, which can make a difference in better identification of the email address.

- it shows the whole list at once; you can have a list as long as you wish. If the list is long, you just scroll the list, there’s no need to mouse over every address. This is much faster.

If someone is not on LinkedIn and not on Facebook, but is identified by Rapportive, the referenced post would work better; if you are really after an email address, try both!

2) Great! You have read my most popular to-date post  

 it will also find people who are on other social sites, most importantly, Facebook.

Thanks for reading. Enjoy!

Thanks to Irina Shamaeva for great Idea!

kandulasantosh - Google Search

kandulasantosh - Google Search

100 Country Codes On LinkedIn

If you log out of LinkedIn and look at its home page, you will find some invaluable information, including a list of 100 countries that have their own URL’s. The exception is the US profiles that have the www beginning along with many smaller countries. For your convenience and at the request from my listeners today, here is a list of the codes:

Country	Code
Afghanistan	af
Albania	al
Algeria	dz
Argentina	ar
Australia	au
Austria	at
Bahrain	bh
Bangladesh	bd
Belgium	be
Bolivia	bo
Bosnia and Herzegovina	ba
Brazil	br
Bulgaria	bg
Canada	ca
Chile	cl
China	cn
Colombia	co
Costa Rica	cr
Croatia	hr
Cyprus	cy
Czech Republic	cz
Denmark	dk
Dominican Republic	do
Ecuador	ec
Egypt	eg
El Salvador	sv
Estonia	ee
Finland	fi
France	fr
Germany	de
Ghana	gh
Greece	gr
Guatemala	gt
Hong Kong	hk
Hungary	hu
Iceland	is
India	in
Indonesia	id
Iran	ir
Ireland	ie
Israel	il
Italy	it
Jamaica	jm
Japan	jp
Jordan	jo
Kazakhstan	kz
Kenya	ke
Korea	kr
Kuwait	kw
Latvia	lv
Lebanon	lb
Lithuania	lt
Luxembourg	lu
Macedonia	mk
Malaysia	my
Malta	mt
Mauritius	mu
Mexico	mx
Montenegro	me
Morocco	ma
Nepal	np
Netherlands	nl
New Zealand	nz
Nigeria	ng
Norway	no
Oman	om
Pakistan	pk
Panama	pa
Peru	pe
Philippines	ph
Poland	pl
Portugal	pt
Puerto Rico	pr
Qatar	qa
Romania	ro
Russian Federation	ru
Saudi Arabia	sa
Serbia	rs
Singapore	sg
Slovak Republic	sk
Slovenia	si
South Africa	za
Spain	es
Sri Lanka	lk
Sweden	se
Switzerland	ch
Taiwan	tw
Tanzania	tz
Thailand	th
Trinidad and Tobago	tt
Tunisia	tn
Turkey	tr
Uganda	ug
Ukraine	ua
United Arab Emirates	ae
United Kingdom	uk
United States	www
Uruguay	uy
Venezuela	ve
Vietnam	vn

How to Source on Github

Some professional sites with software developer population that charge recruiters arm and leg to access the user data, like stackoverflow, are quite hard to search. It’s possible, but it’s not easy. Github is a place where excellent developers hang out, that provides its own clean ways to search for its content – and its users:

If you are not a fan of search operators, you can simply do this:

Start searching for users…

Select a programming language…

Add a couple of clever keywords… (not necessarily these, but this example may give you some keyword ideas) and see results like this:

I never said that we should be emailing people as soon as we get hold of lists like this. More research and pre-qualification is always a good idea. But that’s quite a bit of sourced data in one quick shot!

X-raying on Google is also possible but the results are a little harder to browse. Try this:

site:github.com “joined on” “San Francisco” “gmail.com”

X-raying on Bing, however, will not find a single thing:

site:github.com “joined on” “San Francisco” “gmail.com”;

guess, why.

I will be explaining this type of people sourcing techniques in-depth at the upcoming webinar on how to source on professional sites, coming up on Tuesday, January 22nd. As usual, the slides, a video-recording, and one month of unlimited support will be provided for all who sign up.

Thanks to Booleanstring to sharing this...

Thanks

Santosh

The Boolean

The Boolean

Thanks to  Irina Shamaeva for Excellent Post..... 

The grand purpose of this post is to become a substitute for Boolean search cheat sheets, without the need to come back or print it out.

The following is just a bit simplified, to point out the main concepts.

Google understands very limited language. It can include any words in English, but there are no sentences (carrying out a description of an action or a statement) or any English grammar. In some cases Google will search for synonyms of the keywords we use.

RULE #1. If you want several words to be included one after another, use the quotation marks. Here is an example. If you want to stop Google from including synonyms, use the quotation marks around the word.

RULE #2. To use one keyword OR another, use OR (capitalized); to exclude a word from your search use the minus:-jobs. That’s usually not a problem even for those who are new to Google’s syntax.

Google knows about many web pages. But all it knows about a page is pretty much this:

• title
• URL
• words
• images
• links to other pages

Google has no idea about resumes, LinkedIn profiles, or any such complexities.

Therefore, to speak to it beyond typing keywords, we can point it to specific titles, URLs, etc. Google gives us these operators to use:

Operators:

• site: look only for URLs that belong to the site
• inurl: look only for URLs that have a given keyword
• intitle: look only for titles that have a given keyword

There’s also a useful operator filetype: that in fact also looks at URLs and finds files of a certain type, like PDF or Excel.

To navigate Google’s search we need to think “backwards”. Let’s think what we are going to find when the search is successful.

Here is an example: if you look at resumes on indeed.com they all have the URL beginning (http://www.indeed.com/r/) in common:

So, to search for them from Google you can use site:http://www.indeed.com/r or site:http://www.indeed.com inurl:r (add your keywords)

Here is another example; this will search for members of the Boolean Strings Network: site:booleanstrings.ning.com intitle:”Page”

RULE #3. Use operators (site:, intitle:, inurl:) to point Google to the target page structure.

That’s it, folks!