Howto find blogs from email addresses?

Question

I know many folks try to find emails form blogs but, I'd like to do the opposite.

For example, if I have someone's gmail email address, could I find out if they have a blogger account? a word press account?

Answer 1

Thats doubtful. You might be able to crawl those sites and see if you can find a matching email address inside the blog. Services don't generally allow anonymous lookups of their users info, for obvious reasons.

Answer 2

No, and maybe.

1. While Blogger makes it possible to go from a profile page to an email address (example 1, example 2), there's no public index of those pages.

2. Wordpress.com doesn't have those type of standardized profile pages, so your chances of getting something there are zero.

3. If you have Yahoo IDs, you may be able to look up users' Yahoo profiles, which can either reference websites the user's associated with (example 1, example 2), or contain a Yahoo blog (example).

Answer 3

1. Get name portion of email address (everything before @), say "foobar"
2. Create URL "http://foobar.wordpress.com" and execute it with you preferred server technology (say HttpClient in Java)
3. Check response code - for the existing site it will be 200, for non-existing it will be 302 (redirect) and you can also check that you are not redirected to en.wordpress.com
4. You can do similar things with other type of sites that support naming conventions of user.site.com or www.site.com/user.
5. Of course there's no guarantee that based on the name that blog will belong to the same person, and there's plenty of blogs that have custom URLs all together
6. Alternatively use Google and parse results