MarkMail - A Great Sourcing Tool

MarkMail.org is a fantastic little site which was introduced recently by a sourcer friend of mine; if you spend any time at all searching for niche technical engineering roles, then you're going to like this. It's also extremely useful for finding direct e-mail addresses if you're finding it difficult to reach someone via InMails or you have out of date contact details.

MarkMail searches through millions (57,938,113 at last count) of e-mails spread across thousands of mailing lists; typically these are mailing lists used for open source projects (for example, here you can see a list of e-mails about bugs found on the ubuntu kernel). You can see all the e-mails sent to this list, who sent them and usually the e-mail address of that sender.

You can search for a particular technology you're sourcing for; someone posting in the group org.perl.module-authors is likely to be contributing to Perl modules, or at least have an interest in Perl modules, so could be relevant to your Perl project once you've cross referenced them with other sources.

Let's take the top contributor to that group; A. Pagalzis:

It doesn't take a lot of detective work to find out that this is Aristotle Pagalzis; a quick Google shows that he looks like a pretty bad-ass Perl developer (amongst other things), you can some of his code on his GitHub account, and best of all he is not on LinkedIn so most of your typical overly-LinkedIn-reliant recruiter types will not be getting in touch with this particular candidate. I've not checked, but I would bet that Eric, Ken, David and Shlomi would be pretty good bets if you were looking for rockstar Perl developers.

You can use a number of different search parameters, including:

from: (which can include any part of a name or e-mail address, eg. from: ibm.com)
subject:
list:
attach: (searches any part of an attachment name; resume or cv perhaps?)
ext: (searches an attachment extension; .pdf or .doc?)

This is an amazing tool to have in your locker if you're a technology sourcer. Not many others will be using it, and it gives you direct access to extremely relevant candidates.

Good luck!

-Tom