Ask HN: Whatever happened to finger? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Whatever happened to finger?

12 pointsJBerlinsky8 comments

Recently, one of my clients asked me to program up a way to determine if a user exists on a server (in an e-mail sense) without sending them an e-mail (it's not a spammer, I promise! I get enough Viagra ads, don't really want to contribute to that.) Like a good little programmer, my mind raced to what was available: Finger and SMTP.

Now, I haven't had to do anything like this in years. Back when I last used finger, some e-mail hosts still implemented it. Now, it turns out that not a single one of the servers I tested support it.

So, HN, I ask you: whatever happened to finger?

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Finger, EXPN, VRFY and such have all pretty much been killed off by SPAM and unwanted marketing.

Most users wouldn't want the ability for an unknown 3rd party to try to guess at, or verify, their contact info.

and the non spamish reasons for wanting to verify an account on a server. e.g. security risk.

Finger was obsoleted by Web 2.0 where users no longer have unix accounts.

To verify an email address, can't you do an SMTP RCPT TO and then cancel? AFAIK some systems use this to verify that sending addresses on incoming mail are legitimate.

You can actually finger twitter/stautsnet users using any.io

  finger username@twitter@any.io
  finger username@identi.ca@any.io

To me, finger seemed to lapse the same way the old-school tilde-based 'personal website' gave way to Geocities et al -- people gradually shifted away from it.

Remember John Carmack of id Software using a plan file to distribute Doom news?

That was, to my own recollection, the last gasp of finger; everyone else I knew of had stopped using it years before he did.

Eric Mill gave a great talk at Ignite RailsConf in Baltimore this year on webfinger.

While not supported everywhere yet, webfinger seems like a really great way to handle machine-readable profile and account information identified by email address.

Here's a link to his blog post that includes his slides and a video of his Ignite presentation: http://mill-industries.com/post/375-journey-of-self-discover...

Other good links for learning about webfinger are http://code.google.com/p/webfinger/ and http://www.abstractioneer.org/2009/04/personal-web-discovery....

I would think it has something to do with the rise of LDAP, which can authenticate users and return pretty much any piece of information that's on the server(s).

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