Submit Hint Search The Forums LinksStatsPollsHeadlinesRSS
14,000 hints and counting!

An AppleScript to search for usenet email addresses Internet
I ran across a way to look up email addresses on Usenet. I incorporated it into an AppleScript which automates the process. The scripts sends a specially formated email to a usenet server, and searches for the email of the name you submit.

Caveat: Depending on the provided name, this can return a lot of email addresses. Also, you must set the variable theSender to your email address.
set theSubject to ""
set theSender to "your_email@your_host.com"
set theAddress to "mail-server@rtfm.mit.edu"
set theBody to "send usenet-addresses/"

tell application "Finder"
  display dialog ¬
  "Enter name to find: LASTNAME FIRSTNAME" default answer ¬
  "Washington George" buttons {"Okey Dokey"} default button 1
  set myName to text returned of the result
      
  tell application "Mail"
    activate
    set newMessage to make new outgoing message with properties ¬
          {subject:theSubject, content:theBody & myName}
    tell newMessage
      set visible to false
      set sender to theSender
      make new to recipient at end of to recipients ¬
      with properties {name:theSender, address:theAddress}
      send
    end tell
  end tell
end tell
Thanks again to jbc and grrl_geek for their help in grokking Mail.app scripting!

[robg adds: The server may take quite a few minutes to process the request, and the list will only include addresses of people who have posted to usenet. If you don't know what usenet is, your email address is probably not going to come up. On the other hand, the usenet archives go way back in time, and if you were active, you may find a long history of your prior email addresses ... don't ask me how I know this :-). This is posted more for the AppleScript example than the exact usage of the script, but it is somewhat interesting...]
    •    
  • Currently 1.00 / 5
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  (1 vote cast)
 
[4,988 views]  

An AppleScript to search for usenet email addresses | 5 comments | Create New Account
Click here to return to the 'An AppleScript to search for usenet email addresses' hint
The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. This site is not responsible for what they say.
An AppleScript to search for usenet email addresses
Authored by: merlyn on Jun 20, '03 11:06:00AM
Why not just do it through their web form instead of a complicated AppleScript and waiting for email. Sheesh, that took me four seconds to find with google.

[ Reply to This | # ]
An AppleScript to search for usenet email addresses
Authored by: merlyn on Jun 20, '03 11:08:37AM

And the data seems to be very stale. Newest data is 1996 or 1997, it appears. Not surprising, because I remember this service starting around 1990, and the web form arriving a few years after that, but nothing new since then.



[ Reply to This | # ]
An AppleScript to search for usenet email addresses
Authored by: eredhuin on Jun 20, '03 08:53:45PM

Please don't post hints that help people (spammers) gather loads of email addresses. It's just polite.



[ Reply to This | # ]
Real spammers don't need help
Authored by: discordantus on Jun 22, '03 05:13:13AM
Are you serious?

No, real spammers don't need help finding email addresses. When they are sending out 40 million emails, I don't see them taking the time to search for small handfulls of email addresses like this. They need something more efficient.

There are programs that harvest email addresses, crawling the web and snatching adresses off any page that it can find them on. This is a very efficient way of snatching email addresses for spamming. Unlike this method, which, from what I can tell, is not the slightest bit efficient.

[ Reply to This | # ]

An AppleScript to search for usenet email addresses
Authored by: idle on Jun 21, '03 07:01:16PM

great. thanks a lot. let's all help more people become spammers. I'm real disappointed robg. You should be helping people learn how to use their OSX computers better, not teaching them how to become the scum of the earth.



[ Reply to This | # ]