Finding email addresses.

I see discussions where people recommend to search for *@companyname.com (there is one in our LI group right now). This is a more or less a repost from LI but I wanted to pick RB member's brains on this.

As far as I know the symbol @ is simply ignored by Google.
"*" is a wildcard and means "some words"
So searching for *@ companyname.com is more or less the same as searching for companyname.com ; it may or may not reveal email addresses. Adding "-www.companyname.com" may help but not much.

(There's no way actually to look for the symbol @ to be included in your search. Google would become too slow if they'd allow that.)

What I do when I search for email addresses looks like this (important: quotes included!):
"email ** companyname.com" - that does reveal email addresses in the search pages.
(Use Contact Capture on top of that, and you have a CSV list.)

(Interestingly, I get different results from
"email * companyname.com "
"email ** companyname.com "
"email *** companyname.com " etc. - I would love somebody to explain why to me)

There are slight variations of this way to look for email addresses, such as
"to ** companyname.com "
"at ** companyname.com "

What do others do?

Thanks,
Irina

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Eric Bullock on November 14, 2008 at 12:50pm

Another way uncover email addresses in Google would be to use the following:
("*.***Companyname.com")(email|contact|to|from)
you can also expand on it by putting some keywords in front of the string. This works well if you know the naming structure that is used for a company. For instance, first.lastname@companyname.com
Here is an example: http://tinyurl.com/6lz65r

Permalink Reply by Michael Johnson on November 14, 2008 at 12:58pm

Once I find the general format for a company's email I go to Mail Tester and put in the person's email address. For example, I may go to LinkedIN and look for someone at the company that has published their email address on their LI profile - ex. name.lastname@company.com. Or you can go to Google groups and do they same thing. Assuming that's the format for the company's email addresses I can then go to Mail Tester to see if it works for the one's I'm looking for.

Mike

Permalink Reply by Amitai Givertz on November 16, 2008 at 5:50pm

Try this:

mailto=*=companyname OR email=*=@companyname

Permalink Reply by Irina Shamaeva on November 16, 2008 at 6:38pm

Hi Amitai,

Thanks! Yes, the "mailto" keyword brings in new results. (A related thought: I wish there were search engines that would search in the HTML source code. I do not know of any.)

May I add something, to help some of our readers understand Google syntax? Your further comments are welcome.

The symbol = works but it's not something special in Google and can be replaced by almost any other symbol without affecting the results. Try mailto\*\companyname or mailto.*.companyname ; the results will be the same.
In this string it pretty much tells Google to keep mailto and companyname together. The same goal is achieved by quotes
"mailto * companyname".
@ is ignored and can be kept or dropped.

Thanks,
Irina

Permalink Reply by Irina Shamaeva on November 16, 2008 at 6:59pm

Eric,

I might be wrong but I think that *.***companyname.com will find the same as (just) companyname.com .

However, for email addresses where there's a middle name letter in the middle (see below) this method will get good results. Putting the word email in front helps too.
Example, try it (include the quotes):

"email *.a.*accenture.com"
"email *.b.*accenture.com"
(you have to go through all the letters)

-Irina

Permalink Reply by Amitai Givertz on November 17, 2008 at 12:34am

Hmmm....

mailto=*=cisco OR email=*=@cisco produces twice as many results as mailto * cisco and mailto\*\cisco

I don't pretend to understand why.

The symbol = works but it's not something special in Google and can be replaced by almost any other symbol without affecting the results. Try mailto\*\companyname or mailto.*.companyname ; the results will be the same. In this string it pretty much tells Google to keep mailto and companyname together. The same goal is achieved by quotes "mailto * companyname". @ is ignored and can be kept or dropped.
Thanks,
Irina

Permalink Reply by Irina Shamaeva on November 17, 2008 at 2:22pm

Amitai,

You have suggested great strings and I am sure that for many it's all they want - strings that work!
More examples are welcome in this discussion.

I was surprised at your example with the number of results but then I remembered that the number of results is often just an estimate. If Google finds anywhere over a few hundred results it gives you an approximate number to start with. (Also, it never tries to provide more than 1000 "true" results.)

So I have added a few random keywords to narrow down your sample search, to bring the numbers of results down, and voila, these strings give the same number of results (200):

"mailto * cisco" OR email\*\cisco john mary robert
mailto=*=cisco OR email=*=@cisco john mary robert

I would admit that these two topics that came up, using special characters and understanding the number of results, do remain a bit of a mystery to me. I'll start a couple of discussions - hope we will learn more from the experts here!

Thanks,
Irina

Permalink Reply by Eric Bullock on November 19, 2008 at 12:44pm

Thanks Mike! I really like that site. It is always good to know if a email address is valid.
Michael Johnson said:

Once I find the general format for a company's email I go to Mail Tester and put in the person's email address. For example, I may go to LinkedIN and look for someone at the company that has published their email address on their LI profile - ex. name.lastname@company.com. Or you can go to Google groups and do they same thing. Assuming that's the format for the company's email addresses I can then go to Mail Tester to see if it works for the one's I'm looking for.

Mike

Permalink Reply by Eric Bullock on November 19, 2008 at 3:32pm

Nice! If I had to track that search I would use something like this to do it...http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=pDlBXyevpZ5OzWxX-UeBiXA
Irina Shamaeva said:

Eric,

I might be wrong but I think that *.***companyname.com will find the same as (just) companyname.com .

However, for email addresses where there's a middle name letter in the middle (see below) this method will get good results. Putting the word email in front helps too.
Example, try it (include the quotes):

"email *.a.*accenture.com"
"email *.b.*accenture.com"
(you have to go through all the letters)

-Irina

Permalink Reply by Irina Shamaeva on November 19, 2008 at 3:51pm

Eric,
Thanks for the spreadsheet. Looks great!

Irina

Permalink Reply by Chris Limboo on November 21, 2008 at 10:09am

great postings look to see few more

Permalink Reply by Amitai Givertz on November 21, 2008 at 11:19am

Just a heads-up, sites like Mail Tester harvest emails for spamming. I don't know if that's the case with Mail Tester but in the past I have recommended similar services and have since stopped.

Michael Johnson said:

Once I find the general format for a company's email I go to Mail Tester and put in the person's email address. For example, I may go to LinkedIN and look for someone at the company that has published their email address on their LI profile - ex. name.lastname@company.com. Or you can go to Google groups and do they same thing. Assuming that's the format for the company's email addresses I can then go to Mail Tester to see if it works for the one's I'm looking for.

Mike