[abuiles]

I wanted to contact people from some companies but their email was not in their profiles, I found this script in github https://github.com/laramies/theHarvester which looks for emails given a domain.

Is super useful, even though It wouldn't give me the email I was looking for, it would show me the "structure" used for emails inside the company:

   [e-mail]
   [e-mail]

Based on that I would just guest the email of the person and it used to work perfectly.

This is perfect for doing customer development, also if you are doing cold reach outs remember to follow the CAN-SPAM act.

[clarkm]

If I ever get into a situation where I can't figure out the address, I just pick one of my guesses and bcc all the rest.

Sure, they might think it's a little weird if they notice they're in the bcc field, but it sure is a lot easier than sending off a single email and spending the next few days wondering if it actually went through.

[hayksaakian]

hmm. I thought the whole point of BCC was "blind carbon-copy". Meaning the person would be unaware as to who else was sent the email?

[greenyoda]

They would know they were in the BCC field if the "To" address was not their correct address.

[hayksaakian]

The trick I've seen is to put your own email in the to field, and all destinations in the bcc

[mindcrime]

Is super useful, even though It wouldn't give me the email I was looking for, it would show me the "structure" used for emails inside the company:

Based on that I would just guest the email of the person and it used to work perfectly.

I've used this technique a bit, but a word of warning... it's definitely not always the case that all emails in a given firm match "the structure". Usually most of them do, but I have found more than one company with a mishmash of patterns for whatever reason.

Probably the most common thing I've noticed is that "important" people (CEO, etc.) may get a different email, and people with really long name (some Indian names fall into this a lot) may be truncated, or swapped out for just an initial.

Still, other than paying for addresses from Jigsaw or Hoovers, this seems to be about the best approach I've found so far.

[anxx]

Related question: is there a limit on email address length? Like a real fundamental limit, not arbitrary decisions Gmail or Yahoo folks might have come up with.

[chronomex]

Header lines are limited to 998 characters (1000 - '\r\n'). Subtract 'To: ' (4 characters) and one practical maximum upper limit is 994 characters including domain.

[elchief]

well the minimum length is 3, and the maximum length is 254:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/386294/what-is-the-maximu...

[mindcrime]

I don't know, but you might be able to parse the answer out of this:

http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2822.html