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 Michael Johnson on November 21, 2008 at 1:57pm

Thanks for the heads up. I had no idea but makes sense.

Amitai Givertz said:

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

Permalink Reply by Suzy Tonini on November 26, 2008 at 12:46pm

Great spreadsheet!

Eric Bullock said:

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