I am excited to show the world v2.0 of our very popular tool: Anymail finder. Anymail finder is used by thousands of people daily to reach new customers and influencers. Hundreds of publications have shared it, and several organizations use our API to power their sales processes.

Visit Anymail finder now

Anymail finder started off as thrust.io, which clearly borrows the name from our company, and was meant to be a quick and dirty tool to get Thrust Division “out there” when it first started.

I put it together in just a week by using a script I had put together a few years back. It was built in Laravel and functioned just fine. I posted it on Hacker News hoping to get some interest and it very quickly took off. Within a few hours, it got posted on Product Hunt and afterwards all over the web, and thousands were using it at the same time.

A problem

This caused a problem. The tool had not been built with scalability in mind, and very quickly our server got blacklisted by several mail servers who thought we were spamming.

I had to move very quickly to add a secondary server and put them behind a very rudimental load balancer, and the system has not changed since. Until today.

A new beginning

We've rebuilt Anymail finder from the ground up. The API is now completely separated from the website and sits behind a proper load balancer that can spin up a new instance as soon as one gets blacklisted by some mail server.

This makes the API a lot more reliable for our customers who process tens of thousands of requests per day.

By popular request, we have also included csv based bulk search. You can now upload a table containing thousdands of names and domains and it will be processed overnight.

We have also improved the pricing model. Until today, API searches and website searches were separate, and API searches were a lot more expensive than web-based searches. We have now changed that by merging them together, and adopting subscription based pricing that should make it cheaper to buy large amount of searches.

Moving from thrust.io

To use Anymail finder, you don't need to do anything. It's up and running, and you'll be redirected there automatically if you visit thrust.io.

If you have an active subscription or unused API credits, you'll need to transfer your account by following these steps:

1. If you are using our API, make sure you follow these upgrade instructions before transferring your account.
2. Go to thrust.io/move and log in with twitter to activate the transfer tool.
3. Choose your log in credentials and click “Transfer”.
4. Enjoy Anymailfinder

Changes in pricing

Our pricing model is now slightly different which means you are no longer able to subscribe to our Premium plan. We will however honor your plan and you'll be able to keep it when you move. Differently than with the other plans, you will not be able to use the API with the premium plan.

All unused API tokens will be added to your new account. You will now have a daily quota of searches with all subscriptions. We will use those before removing tokens, and they will never expire if unused.

Future steps

We are very excited for our new system. While the average user will not notice significant change, the infrastructure behind it is a lot stronger, and our API users will see a lot less errors.

It also opens the door to develop exciting new features that I'll talk about in a future post.

Bye for now,

Joe