It all started when I was looking for a former manager of mine. I had lost all the TPAs (“touch-point attributes”) of him. Then I found him on LinkedIn. The challenge was to get in touch with him without jumping through various degrees of separation. I finally managed to connect with him by guessing his e-mail address!
Here’s what you need to do:
- You have to know the name of the person and the name of the company that person is working for (We are not trying to spam, spammers use the name dictionary attack)
- Next, the idea is to find out the pattern of e-mail address for that company. Go to Google groups or simply Google search. For example, if your contact works for HP — type “@hp.com”. You will get a lot of results for a large company esp. in technology space. The trick is to filter down the search results by adding an extra keyword in the search parameter; say we add, mySQL (a “commercial” open-source database). One of the result in the top 5 has a link to a forum which gives the answer as firstname.lastname@hp.com. There you go, you now have the e-mail address pattern for your target contact.
Here are the three most common e-mail patterns:
- firstname.lastname@example.com (most common on Microsoft Exchange platforms)
- firstname_lastname@example.com (common among Lotus Notes users)
- flastname@example.com (common on Unix based mail servers)
- Thanks to the pattern, you “know” the person now — Just shoot a LinkedIn invite.
Easy(maybe you already knew!)
Disclaimer: I’m not a spammer, nor I derive any revenue from hacking, spamming or doing anything like that. Nor, there is any hidden idea to discredit LinkedIn or it’s great service. I’m just an ordinary next door geek who wants to make things easy with some automation in life.