SocialScan – Check Email Address and Username Availability on Online Platforms

Give an email address or username, socialscan returns whether it is available, taken or invalid on online platforms. Its speed also makes it suitable for bulk queries involving hundreds of usernames and email addresses.

The following platforms are currently supported:

Background

Other similar tools check username availability by requesting the profile page of the username in question and based on information like the HTTP status code or error text on the requested page, determine whether a username is already taken. This is a naive approach that fails in the following cases:

• Reserved keywords: Most platforms have a set of keywords that they don’t allow to be used in usernames
  (A simple test: try checking reserved words like ‘admin’ or ‘home’ or ‘root’ and see if other services mark them as available)
• Deleted/banned accounts: Deleted/banned account usernames tend to be unavailable even though the profile pages might not exist

Therefore, these tools tend to come up with false positives and negatives. This method of checking is also dependent on platforms having web-based profile pages and cannot be extended to email addresses.

socialscan aims to plug these gaps.

UserRecon – Find usernames across 75 social networks

Features

1. 100% accuracy: Rather than scanning profile pages, socialscan queries the registration servers of the platforms directly, retrieving the appropriate CSRF tokens, headers, and cookies. This eliminates all false positives/negatives, ensuring that results are accurate.
2. Speed: socialscan uses asyncio along with aiohttp to conduct all queries concurrently, resulting in very quick searching even with bulk queries.

Installation

pip

> pip install socialscan

Install from source

> git clone https://github.com/iojw/socialscan.git  
> cd socialscan  
> pip install .

Usage

usage: socialscan [list of usernames/email addresses to check]

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  --platforms [platform [platform ...]], -p [platform [platform ...]]
                        list of platforms to query (default: all platforms)
  --view-by {platform,query}
                        view results sorted by platform or by query (default:
                        query)
  --available-only, -a  only print usernames/email addresses that are
                        available and not in use
  --cache-tokens, -c    cache tokens for platforms requiring more than one
                        HTTP request (Snapchat, GitHub, Instagram. Lastfm &
                        Tumblr), reducing total number of requests sent
  --input input.txt, -i input.txt
                        file containg list of queries to execute
  --proxy-list proxy_list.txt
                        file containing list of HTTP proxy servers to execute
                        queries with
  --verbose, -v         show query responses as they are received
  --version             show program's version number and exit

5 Tools to protect your Social Media accounts

As a library

socialscan can also be imported into existing code and used as a library.

v1.0.0 introduces the async method execute_queries and the corresponding synchronous wrapper sync_execute_queries that takes a list of queries and optional list of platforms and proxies, executing all queries concurrently. The method then returns a list of results in the same order.

from socialscan.util import Platforms, sync_execute_queries

queries = ["username1", "[email protected]", "[email protected]"]
platforms = [Platforms.GITHUB, Platforms.LASTFM]
results = sync_execute_queries(queries, platforms)
for result in results:
    print(f"{result.query} on {result.platform}: {result.message} (Success: {result.success}, Valid: {result.valid}, Available: {result.available})")

Output:

username1 on GitHub: Username is already taken (Success: True, Valid: True, Available: False)
username1 on Lastfm: Sorry, this username isn't available. (Success: True, Valid: True, Available: False)
[email protected] on GitHub: Available (Success: True, Valid: True, Available: True)
[email protected] on Lastfm: Sorry, that email address is already registered to another account. (Success: True, Valid: True, Available: False)
[email protected] on GitHub: Available (Success: True, Valid: True, Available: True)
[email protected] on Lastfm: Looking good! (Success: True, Valid: True, Available: True)

Contributing

Errors, suggestions or want a site added? Submit an issue.