The First Name @ Mass-Email-Finding Hack

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Our online lives depend on little things. Slow performance and lack of functionality caused by limited computing power restrict our data gathering ability in seemingly small but consequential ways. (As always, our perceived needs run before computers’ ability.)

As an example, Google will not search for the symbol @ as a part of an email address. At this time it would be too expensive.

Google does, however, notice the periods, and we can take advantage of that.

While figuring out how to massively source emails, I noticed that many companies predominantly follow the [email protected] format. And some, follow it diligently.

Here are the unique stats we have collected: of Fortune 500 companies, 72 are E100, and of those, there are 56jane.doe”s and 10jdoe”s:

I am assuming that companies that deviate from the preferred format still have a high percentage of jane.doe emails.

The vast majority of corporate emails start with a first name followed by a period and end with a .com or another extension.

Google handles both the name and .com as separate words. Realizing this gives us instant sourcing power. We can un-dig pages with emails and contact lists that Google won’t rank high otherwise.

To run such searches, first, Google for common first names. Start with a couple of first female and male names. Add professional keywords as usual (but not too many). Do not forget to put “at” before the name. You can generate a series of queries in Excel, run, and collect all emails with our Email Collector.

Here are two sample searches:

The British say “on,” not “at,” so you can collect a few more.

Just dropping “at” is also an excellent idea!

Join us for the always-popular and practical workshop “Find Anyone’s Contact Info and learn various email- and phone-finding techniques this week.

P.S. Notice how many of my latest posts reveal approaches that have been available for years. There is so much more to discover!

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