Prospect – Find Emails from LinkedIn Profiles

My immediate reaction is to recoil away from services that give away emails or phone numbers. I work for a contact info company and we've always been very wary of giving out emails, so seeing another company go ahead and be proud of that... it's a little shocking. I get enough cold email spam as it is.

As an advertiser, you desperately want the ability to get info like this. But once you have it, you quickly realize how almost useless it is.

What makes Google Adwords so powerful, is that a search query shows an intent to find a solution or service, so you are advertising to someone already looking for what you are offering.

Emailing someone just causes them to wonder 1) how you got their email, and 2) offers no context other than their bio so it just comes off as spammy and annoying.

It has become a lot more common for spam to arrive in the form of inside sales reps sending semi-personalized emails to a guessed email address. Even running a startup with just two people, we could get multiple emails a week from sales reps who just guessed the email based on my name and the company. I'm sure it only gets worse as the company grows.

I have started adopting the following approach to keeping email accounts spam free:

1) Choose a non-standard address format. For instance, my name, Devin Helton could be devhelton or devinhelt. I would avoid devin@ or dhelton.

2) Have a few different aliases. You can set this up pretty easily in gmail or fastmail. Give out one alias when signing up for services, another alias that is semi-public, another alias for people you personally correspond with. You can then set up filters that separate out the messages, so personal correspondence is separated from sales emails.

Great! Now I can get my recruiter spam directly to my email, so I don't have to open up my linkedin and see it there.

Seriously though, be aware of spam regulations that can apply to whoever you're contacting. At the very least, read up on your local laws before you do something stupid like use this.

PerfectLeads.com also lets you do this, but also lets you find the right companies to contact in the first place.

If you are a mobile web developer, you might want to target restaurants that are not mobile friendly, and have a certain level of traffic (alexa rank). Sure you need the email address, but firstly you also need to target the right companies. That's why I made PerfectLeads.

This is actually incredibly useful! Thanks for the link... Reaching out for B2B purposes, this makes the process much more efficient.