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.
Re:The Art of Finding Anyone’s Email Addresses
by chronomex on Saturday May 25, 2013 @07:39PM
(#5769335)
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.
Re:The Art of Finding Anyone’s Email Addresses
by elchief on Sunday May 26, 2013 @03:26AM
(#5770349)
well the minimum length is 3, and the maximum length is 254:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/386294/what-is-the-maximu...
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.