Photo by Mzelle Biscotte

I’ve had a lot of people ask me about the FindByEmail service I set up, so I’ve decided to release the code as open-source. You pass it an email address, and it queries 11 different public APIs to discover what information those services have on the user with that email address. Give it a try for yourself by entering an email address below:

Email address:

The code is under the 2-clause BSD license, to make it easy for commercial reuse. It’s all in PHP, and you’ll need to add your own API keys for some of the services to config.php before you can use it yourself. It’s up on github at

http://github.com/petewarden/findbyemail

If you do find more services that offer an email-to-user mapping, either let me know and I’ll add them, or fork the project and I’ll merge your changes back in. The module currently supports these services:

Gravatar
Yahoo
43things
Vimeo
Amazon
Brightkite
AIM
Friendfeed
Google Social Graph
Rapleaf
DandyID

The last four conglomerate information for multiple services, so it can sometimes retrieve Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook account data. There’s also some code for querying Skype, but since that involves setting up a Skype client instance running inside a headless X-Window session, I’ve commented that code out for now.