
Show HN: Find any email address on the web - beeker87
https://maildb.io
======
CM30
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).

~~~
beeker87
Thank you!

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.

~~~
danhardman
So you've taken something that only companies with large budgets were able to
do, and made it possible for everyone?

Any way I can remove my email from your website in case a website I've signed
up to hasn't hidden my email sufficiently?

What robots.txt rules do I add to protect my users in case emails get posted
to my site in comments/posts?

~~~
beeker87
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.

~~~
JakeStone
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.

~~~
beeker87
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.

We'll discuss this for beta, thank you!

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danhardman
This seems like an incredibly unethical tool on first glance.

~~~
hashkb
Yes... it's a lead generation tool for sales and marketing people.

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jventura
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?

~~~
beeker87
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.

You can view our privacy policy here
[https://maildb.io/privacy](https://maildb.io/privacy)

~~~
novium
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.

~~~
beeker87
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.

------
tommymachine
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.

~~~
beeker87
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.

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andwur
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.

~~~
beeker87
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.

------
lighttower
You can already do this in Bing with the + modifier

~~~
beeker87
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.

~~~
lighttower
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.

~~~
beeker87
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.

~~~
niccolop
I'm also curious to try it out... I spend all day searching for emails.

------
geoffw8
alternatively emailhunter.co is great at this, they also have a Chrome
extension you can just click when you're on a target domain

