Surprising how poor the reception for this kind of research is.. it's 2019, porn/adult entertainment is a huge industry. I'd expect the tech industry at least to be more open to discussing it.
I would be very cautious using Anymailfinder.com to generate email lists -- based on this copy on anymailfinder.com:
Anymail finder uses many approaches to find emails—it searches billions of web pages and performs direct server validation.
The original SMTP spec allows for email address validation, and there are tricks like opening an SMTP connection to a mail server and dropping it half way if the address is verified -- but these are the same "tricks" that spammers use, so many mail servers disable or report false positives. There's a reason why most lead services have a high price: they have actually verified an email address.
Next, sending cold emails to business is OK (sometimes annoying but legally ok), but the copy on makesmail.com has a broken link (1) and doesn't clearly describe how to cold email and be legally compliant. From the horses mouth: https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/can...
Regardless, congratulations on building up to $1,500 MRR, that is a milestone most side projects never reach!
The thing is no one respects the CAN-SPAM act in high touch b2b sales, and no one cares about it.
Most people that are getting email addresses in this way are using it as a cheaper and more effective alternative to LinkedIn inmail, cold emails and cold calls are a great way to sell and if you do it right the recipient of the comms doesn't even care that you harvested their details.
Doing it right means the message is very targeted, and most of the time you have people or companies in common with the person you're reaching out to.
You can pretty easily find out if the server will return false positives by first testing a completely random email like 737377ndjd@domain.com . Not sure if he's doing that or not.
For running a developer event like BattleSnake.io, C9 is amazing.
After a few years of headaches trying to help students get their local dev environments setup, we started recommending Cloud9 to all Students. Definitely the way of the future.
