There's an entire cottage industry of linkedin scrapers that put a lot of effort into guessing your email address to enable cold outreach.

I'm ashamed to say I worked at one such place for several months.

Apollo is probably the most comprehensive source for this. It's creepy as fuck.

Yes I notice that too. I hide my last name now because at my company it's just firstname.lastname so easy to guess.

It helps a lot but I still get a lot of sales goons. A lot of them follow up constantly too "hey what about that meeting invite I sent you why did you not attend"? My deleted email box is full of them (I instantly block them the minute I get an invite to anything from someone I don't know, and I wish Outlook had the ability to ban the entire origin domain too but it doesn't)

Put an emoji after your name in LinkedIn. Something that obviously isn’t part of your name. All the bots that scrape LinkedIn and guess your email address will include the emoji when addressing you in an email; no humans will. You can then use this in a spam filter.

I think it would be fairly easy to clean up. It should help with the dumbest spammers though.

I’m a bit on the fence with this one. Sure, spam is bad, but they also enable you to reach out to somebody outside of the LinkedIn’s walled garden (personally, without automation).

If it enables a tiny startup trying to solve the exact problem I have to reach out to me – I’d say it’s a net positive (but not by a huge margin), and having to blacklist @mongodb.com with their certifications bullshit is a price I’m ready to pay. If more spammers get their hands on this kind of dataset though it’ll probably be a disaster.

I think your example goes out of the scope of an expensive platform like Apollo that exists to maintain a shadow profile based off of your online presence, though.

Maybe the thought occurs that one is only accessible on LinkedIn on purpose and just because a recruiter from 8 years ago has your number, it's not up for grabs?

"Spyware" doesn't quite capture it.

It's "intelligence platform" in the sense that you can gain a ton of information on individuals, organizations, and relationships that drive it all. If you can track how people move and interact between organizations, you can determine who someone is doing business with and even make an educated guess if that's a sale or interview.

I started writing about it almost 20 years ago: https://caseysoftware.com/blog/linkedin-intelligence-part-ii and turned it into a conference presentation called "Shattering Secrets with Social Media"

But there have been numerous proofs of concept over the years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Sage

Bro if you want people to read your stuff. Don't require java script to view the page. Smart people block that stuff.

I couldn't agree more.

Spyware