Yesterday I tested a new algorithm we just wrote that intelligently determines someone's first name from just their email address. The algorithm is purely an analysis of the email address characters and doesn't query any APIs that provide demographic data on email addresses.
I ran my test on an actual campaign to GMass users announcing a couple new features (but not the first-name detection feature). Here's a screen shot from my Sent Mail of my own Gmail account (click the image to see it bigger):
As the above screen shot shows, the algorithm guessed the recipient's first name in most cases. Only 5 out of this sampling of 50 produced an incorrect guess, and the unmarked rows are ones where the first name was impossible to guess because it wasn't present in the email address.
Over the coming days, I'm going to fine-tune the algorithm and then make it available to all GMass users.
I ran my test on an actual campaign to GMass users announcing a couple new features (but not the first-name detection feature). Here's a screen shot from my Sent Mail of my own Gmail account (click the image to see it bigger):
| Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.  |
| The green rows indicate rows where the first name was correctly determined, while the red ones indicate an incorrect guess. |
Over the coming days, I'm going to fine-tune the algorithm and then make it available to all GMass users.
