Corporate Email Question

October 15, 2004 1:52 PM

Is there such a thing as a Web site where you can type in the name of a particular organization or domain, and find out what e-mail scheme they assign their employees? Let's say you're trying to locate John Smith at the fictitious Omni Product Corporation...then you could look up the company and find out whether they typically give out addresses that are "[e-mail]," "johnsmith@...," "js,"...etc.? I realize this sounds like a spam apocalypse, but it would be so useful.
posted by inksyndicate to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

Can you not just Google for the domain name itself and look for e-mail addresses? Works for a few corp domain names I just tried.
posted by Mwongozi at 2:17 PM on October 15, 2004

and find out what e-mail scheme they assign their employees?
Not exactly but: Google: [e-mail]
and a little brain power works just as well.
posted by m@ at 2:35 PM on October 15, 2004

Sometimes when I'm sleuthing organizations (usually when trying to find contacts for employment purposes), I actually troll usenet (via, of course, Google Groups) for email addresses. This often reveals addresses that a web search wouldn't, and has been useful for me in reconstructing official schema, if any.
posted by weston at 2:39 PM on October 15, 2004

Response by poster: Yeah, I like to type "smith domainname.com" in quotes in Google. I wonder if there's a cool script that would do it.
posted by inksyndicate at 2:59 PM on October 15, 2004

If there was a script, spammers would have already built it, sold it, and exploited it to the hilt.

I think the google searching will help most folks out trying to legitimately contact someone at a company.
posted by mathowie at 3:29 PM on October 15, 2004

I used to work somewhere that shared offices with a company that said, oh no we're not spamming people, but do you know any high school kids we could hire to poke around credit unions, universities, etc and figure out their naming scheme? (They had a list of first and last names from these places somehow and wanted to, well, spam the crap out of them). I'm assuming they put a lot of time and energy into figuring out how to automate it and failed.
posted by RustyBrooks at 4:28 PM on October 15, 2004