It's an interesting idea, I'll say that much. A way to find email addresses associated with a certain domain is a pretty neat thing to have.
That said, isn't this a spam nightmare waiting to happen? I mean, if you give a spammer or two hundred access to this site, then all hell is gonna break loose (especially with popular websites that spammers and scumbags might want emails associated with).
And with your crawler taking email addresses from blogs, articles, comments and other such sources, it seems like this is a doxing tool just waiting to be used. It's not uncommon for people to post email addresses associated with those they don't like on a personal level, especially if they're in the middle of a large controversy (like say, the recent US elections).
I really hope you've figured out a way to avoid that side. And considered adding a way for sites to opt out (either on a domain level or an individual email address level).
For spammers specifically, you're correct in that our service could possibly be used to gather emails by someone with the intention of spamming. This is true though really for any lead generation type service.
While we will be offering a free plan level, it will be very limited in terms of the number of emails you can find. In order to get more requests, there will be paid monthly plans. To be honest, the crawler part of our service is something sophisticated spammers have probably been doing for awhile now, and wouldn't see the benefit of paying for, for their specific uses.
With regards to the privacy concern, our crawler only finds emails that have been publicly posted. It also follows the standard rules expected of web crawlers today. For users to find emails, they must do so by a specific domain name, so for instance you couldn't just search for John Doe and find a Gmail address.
Exactly, our goal is to make this service something affordable for everyone. The current solutions, imho, are charging an insane amount for what they offer.
We haven't discussed this yet but it seems like a good idea, so we'll probably have a page dedicated to this where users can tell us to remove their email from our database.
Once we're in beta, our crawler will operate under a specific name which you can refer to in your robots.txt exclusion rules. We'll have an info page for this.
Something to consider, how about having the ability to delist domains?
I have a few domains that I use as pre-spam filters so that I can see immediately if my email address was spammed. e.g., I receive an email addressed to sun.com@myhappydomain.com but it's advertising something along the lines of rutabaga hentai.
If I could remove myhappydomain.com completely, that would be a happy making thing.
Not a bad idea, could have it work on the same principles as the robot exclusion, but just have a simple web submission form for domains. To prevent malicious use, could maybe have it send a confirmation link for delisting to an email address associated with the domain.
Talking of Gmail, what are you going to do about those services?
Because letting people find emails associated with the gmail or yahoo domain would theoretically give you millions of results. Do you plan to delist any webmail service related domains?
And do you have any idea what to do if someone complains that their email isn't public but someone else has been posting it online (say, to let people attack them)?
So you have a tool to find emails, something that scammers and spammers may use, and the first thing you ask on your website is for my email address?! How trustful is that?
We only track emails that have been publicly posted on the web.
Using emails that have been submitted to us through our signup form would obviously be a huge violation of privacy. We don't do this, and we never will.
On the topic of tracking emails that are "publicly posted on the web", how are you then making sure that the emails have been published with consent and don't originate in sources like database dumps etc.? As it does still sound somewhat unethical to use emails that aren't published with consent.
Usually you'll see someone release site data, such as a database dump, via sites like pastebin. Either that or the release is zipped and hosted somewhere for download. We're most likely going to have crawler skip potentially risky sites, such as pastebin. Our crawler also will not have the ability to download and view actual files.
Also, we are probably going to implement specific pages that allow anyone to delist their domain and/or email address from our service.
I disagree with the premise where time spent finding an email is wasted time. Personal control over the privacy of one's email is exactly what makes email valuable.
This is true for both sender and receiver because: Larger inbox load means less time/mental energy per message which in turn means lower value per message.
It's like the reverse of a network effect: the more users you have spamming people, the less valuable those emails become.
I agree that an email address is something very valuable.
With our service though, it's simply storing emails found through a vast search of the web. If, for instance, a CEO at a company doesn't give out their email publicly, you'll never be able to find it using us because we will never find it. However, if they did post their email somewhere, chances are you could find it with enough time and clever searching.
Our service aims to minimize the time spent for the latter. In that sense, we simply give you an advantage. Not everyone will be using our service.
If you're relying on crawlers to build your database how do you plan on dealing with spam traps? I see you have a verification aspect to your service but from what detail you have provided it would be incapable of distinguishing legitimate from trap.
Their presence in your lists could ultimately render the service useless as users risk blacklisting by contacting such addresses.
To be honest, we probably won't try and filter out spam traps. Our service is really meant to aid you in finding specific emails.
Given that, we will be implementing multiple verification and confidence checks for each email address. This is to help ensure a given email address is for a real person, with multiple legitimate web sources listing it, before you ever send a message.
This is true, but you may have to go through hundreds of search results in order to find the right email. Also, we use extensive pattern matching which would be very hard to mimic through a search query.
In a sense, our service just saves you a lot of time from finding and then verifying an email.
yes, I do spend a lot of time finding emails. as a startup founder I did much of my sales development over email / linkedin. I learned the quirks of several search engines - and made it work. Bing was the best. Google, ironically, the worst. This service is something I'd be interested in for sure.
Awesome. Our goal is to create a quality, enterprise level piece of software, which is affordable for everyone and actually makes sense to use given the price point and benefits.
If you ever want to talk about business/startups or anything, send me an email.
That said, isn't this a spam nightmare waiting to happen? I mean, if you give a spammer or two hundred access to this site, then all hell is gonna break loose (especially with popular websites that spammers and scumbags might want emails associated with).
And with your crawler taking email addresses from blogs, articles, comments and other such sources, it seems like this is a doxing tool just waiting to be used. It's not uncommon for people to post email addresses associated with those they don't like on a personal level, especially if they're in the middle of a large controversy (like say, the recent US elections).
I really hope you've figured out a way to avoid that side. And considered adding a way for sites to opt out (either on a domain level or an individual email address level).