Email Crawler – Email Address Crawler and Extractor – Atomic …
Atomic Email Hunter is an email crawler that crawls websites for email addresses and user names in a convenient and automatic way. Gathered emails are stored in a separate file, so you get a list of target email addresses.
With our email crawling software email addresses are found in a fully automated mode — just specify necessary keywords or URLs and start searching. The video below shows Atomic Email Hunter at work.
How Email Crawling Software Works
Atomic Email Hunter navigates websites a simple search engine, scans them for any contact information and extracts email addresses and user names if any. The search query is submitted as a keyword or valid URL (entered in the search bar), and one of 42 available search engines is chosen for scanning websites.
Main Features of Email Address Crawler
As our program performs fast and relevant email extraction, there is a large number of specific features to make your search faster and more targeted:
Get emails from one or several websites based on keyphrase (a lot of email crawling tools don’t support this search type) and ignore hidden emails.
Select necessary search results according to the filter rules or skip poor domains.
Specify depth level and paths limits.
Set up working in multi-threaded mode and proxy support for faster email search.
An email address crawler is a simple tool that requires Internet connection and very few computer resources. In addition, it can search for emails in background mode, so when you launch the program, your email search starts and you don’t have to worry about anything until it’s finished.
Unlike other email crawlers, Atomic Email Hunter does not require the installation of any additional software. Please note that email crawling software must support proxy servers for better search results and fast web-surfing. Atomic Email Hunter fully supports working with proxies and can automatically detect a better one. With a proxy-compatible crawler email search is much more safe and you have a better chance to get as many emails as you need without being banned by websites.
No Email address crawler guarantees that gathered emails are valid. We recommend verifying the list of addresses you have collected to make ensure in email validity. If you need bulk email software keep in mind Atomic
Mail Sender in mind, or have a look at Atomic
Email Studio – a full studio of email marketing software containing 9 programs in 1 interface.
Save 30% with a package including 6 email scrapers
To generate a great list of extracted email addresses and save 30%, go to the Discounts & Special offers menu and order the “Massreach Package” including the following 6 scrapers:
Email Hunter searches for email addresses through the Internet;
Email Logger extracts email addresses from your computer;
WhoIs Explorer searches through the WHOIS database and finds personal data of Internet domain owners;
Newsgroup Explorer scans newsgroups and extracts emails along with user names;
CD Email Extractor scrapes for emails on any CDs and DVDs;
Web Spider browses each site you visit, including password-protected websites, for contact information.
Depending on the type of crawler, email addresses can be extracted from different sources (harddrive, CDs, etc. ). We have all the necessary tools to help you get emails from any source
Atomic Email Hunter Screenshots
Click on any screenshot to enlarge. A larger screenshot will open in the current window.
Got Questions?
Our email crawler is much more than meets the eye, so if you want to get a deeper understanding of all the features, our support team is ready to answer all your questions. Besides, if you think that something doesn’t quite work the way it should, we will be thankful for any feedback that can allow us to further improve the performance of our software.
In the meantime, you can discover a lot more about our products by visting the support page
An Introduction to Email Scraping | Hacker Noon
An Introduction to Email Scraping is a program designed to extract email addresses from web pages. Scrapers can save information, process it, and provide it in a graphical form. Email scrapers let you automate the process of collecting the data. The legal issues of email scraping are under the legality of web scraping, which is still negotiable. Legal issues are how you follow the law if you follow compliance with the law and use the scraping process legally. Legal cases also include you scrape data for digital marketing purposes (scraping online reviews about your brand) and ArdenWriting about tech and marketing. DISCLAIMER: the information provided below must be used only for informational purposes. Please consult your legal team if you have specific questions or concerns regarding the compliance with any relevant es often need their potential customers’ contact details for marketing campaigns and growing their sales. Obviously, they require an enormous customer list and up-to-date information for productive email marketing campaigns. A good database of potential consumers may include up to thousands of contacts. Fortunately, such data can be collected not only manually but also with special web scraping software. Let’s find out what email scraping is, how you can use it, and what’s more important, whether it’s legal or not. What Is an Email Scraper? An email parser or scraper is a program designed to extract email addresses from web pages. Such programs can usually extract email addresses from web pages and upload the results to a necessary file format, for example, Excel. For collecting email addresses from the web, professional scrapers usually parse data from social networks (LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. ) or forums. If a company needs to find the email addresses of legal entities, it collects the required information from these firms’ corporate scrapers let you automate the process of collecting the data. Their main advantage is that they do it incredibly quickly. One can find a hundred addresses in a couple of minutes. What’s more, the program can save information, process it, and provide it in a graphical form. In brief, email scraping consists of the following steps:The program searches for and selects websites according to various parameters: subject (keywords), date of publication, location, and other criteria (you can configure their list manually) web scraper searches for any lines containing “@” and “email” on the selected sites. The application adds the matching objects to your database. Why Do You Need an Email Scraper? A database of potential customers’ emails is necessary when it comes to marketing and commercial offers. Since every trade offer must fall exactly into its target audience, the database must have specific characteristics and be narrowly-focused. Thus, your web scraper must collect not any email addresses but only the necessary ones. Why may you need an email scraper? You’re probably running a commercial company or a private entity and conducting your business activities via the Internet. Moreover, the email addresses database can help public organizations or companies that conduct their activities exclusively majority of sales managers point out that it is the search for customers that takes up a significant part of the time. Out of hundreds of processed people, only a few real customers will reply to the offer. So email scraping helps you:collect an extensive database of email addresses;reduce the time spent on finding clients;automate the process of an email marketing campaign;track the history of actions negative perception of web scrapingThough web scraping has many advantages and helps us save much time, we often hear that web scraping has a negative reputation because of the following matters: Businesses use web scraping to gain a competitive advantage. So there is often the financial motivation behind companies use scraping in complete disregard of copyright and the site’s terms of service. People often use web scraping dishonestly. For example, parsers can send much more requests per second than a person, resulting in an unexpected overload on sites. Scrapers can also remain anonymous and not define themselves in any way. And, as a result, they can perform prohibited actions: bypass security measures that protect data from automatic downloading, Email Scraping Legal? Though email scraping is extremely helpful for businesses, it’s still undergoing growing difficulties when it comes to legal matters. Since the email scraping process collects pre-existing data from the web, businesses who hope to leverage scrapers for their processes face some ethical and legal difficulties. The legal issues of email scraping are under the legality of web scraping, which is still sically, web scraping is legal by itself if you follow compliance. The critical aspect that matters is how you are going to use the parsed information. After all, you could scrape or crawl your own website without a hitch. Or you run a startup and want to use crawling for gathering data without the need for partnerships. Legal web scraping also includes cases when you scrape data for digital marketing purposes (scraping online reviews about your brand, detecting negative feedback to reply to it shortly), analytics (analyzing competitors’ pricing), and more. If the scraped data is publicly available, the scraping process complies with the law and is legal. Thus, email scraping is legit if you collect contacts that are available for everybody across the Net. While scraping a website for contact details, you must also check the website’s Terms of Use. You can easily find Terms of Use and Copyright details on the website itself. Usually, the website’s owners state if web scraping is allowed or prohibited and how you can use the scraped legal web scraping involves:copying data that is copyrighted;scraping private data that requires username and passcodes;selling confidential data to a you need to scrape contact details like emails and phone numbers, you’ll probably want to gather data from rich contact databases like LinkedIn and Crunchbase. You must check before scraping such websites whether they allow accessing the data without creating an account and paying for a subscription. Scraping behind a login page is unethical and illegal and is never allowed by website ditionally, the account you’ve registered on the website allows the website owners to collect additional information about you, including how and where you log in and your usage of their service. With these data, it becomes much easier for the website owners to identify web scraping on the platform and ban you. Thus, it’s best to look for publicly available data before considering this option and only then consider the given risks when it comes to scraping behind a login About GDPR and CCPA? Legislation that protects individuals’ online privacy includes the notable EU’s GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and California’s CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act). It’s worth noting that these laws protect individuals, not businesses. So if you’re going to gather potential customers’ email addresses or phone numbers, these very laws will apply to your actions. Remember to consider the following matters when you scrape emails from a website:Individuals have a right to ask you for a copy of what data you store about them. Complying with these requests demonstrates your compliance with the applicable laws. All personal data, including contact details, must be stored securely, in line with best practice. After you’ve scraped personal data, you must keep this information secure and protect it with encryption. Never sell or share the scraped information with 3rd parties unless you agree on it with the individual. To sum up, email scraping is a powerful tool to generate business leads. It can be beneficial as long as it is used with the wishes of the target website in mind and with the respect of any individual whose data is collected. Always use email scraping ethically and consult with a lawyer when you doubt your actions comply with the law. TagsJoin Hacker Noon Create your free account to unlock your custom reading experience.
Email-address harvesting – Wikipedia
Email harvesting or scraping is the process of obtaining lists of email addresses using various methods. Typically these are then used for bulk email or spam.
Methods[edit]
The simplest method involves spammers purchasing or trading lists of email addresses from other spammers.
Another common method is the use of special software known as “harvesting bots” or “harvesters”, which spider Web pages, postings on Usenet, mailing list archives, internet forums and other online sources to obtain email addresses from public data.
Spammers may also use a form of dictionary attack in order to harvest email addresses, known as a directory harvest attack, where valid email addresses at a specific domain are found by guessing email address using common usernames in email addresses at that domain. For example, trying,,, etc. and any that are accepted for delivery by the recipient email server, instead of rejected, are added to the list of theoretically valid email addresses for that domain.
Another method of email address harvesting is to offer a product or service free of charge as long as the user provides a valid email address, and then use the addresses collected from users as spam targets. Common products and services offered are jokes of the day, daily bible quotes, news or stock alerts, free merchandise, or even registered sex offender alerts for one’s area. Another technique was used in late 2007 by the company iDate, which used email harvesting directed at subscribers to the Quechup website to spam the victim’s friends and contacts. [1]
Harvesting sources[edit]
Spammers may harvest email addresses from a number of sources. A popular method uses email addresses which their owners have published for other purposes. Usenet posts, especially those in archives such as Google Groups, frequently yield addresses. Simply searching the Web for pages with addresses — such as corporate staff directories or membership lists of professional societies — using spambots can yield thousands of addresses, most of them deliverable. Spammers have also subscribed to discussion mailing lists for the purpose of gathering the addresses of posters. The DNS and WHOIS systems require the publication of technical contact information for all Internet domains; spammers have illegally trawled these resources for email addresses. Spammers have also concluded that generally, for the domain names of businesses, all of the email addresses will follow the same basic pattern and thus are able to accurately guess the email addresses of employees whose addresses they have not harvested. Many spammers use programs called web spiders to find email addresses on web pages. Usenet article message-IDs often look enough like email addresses that they are harvested as well. Spammers have also harvested email addresses directly from Google search results, without actually spidering the websites found in the search.
Spammer viruses may include a function which scans the victimized computer’s disk drives (and possibly its network interfaces) for email addresses. These scanners discover email addresses which have never been exposed on the Web or in Whois. A compromised computer located on a shared network segment may capture email addresses from traffic addressed to its network neighbors. The harvested addresses are then returned to the spammer through the bot-net created by the virus. In addition, sometime the addresses may be appended with other information and cross referenced to extract financial and personal data.
A recent, controversial tactic, called “e-pending”, involves the appending of email addresses to direct-marketing databases. Direct marketers normally obtain lists of prospects from sources such as magazine subscriptions and customer lists. By searching the Web and other resources for email addresses corresponding to the names and street addresses in their records, direct marketers can send targeted spam email. However, as with most spammer “targeting”, this is imprecise; users have reported, for instance, receiving solicitations to mortgage their house at a specific street address — with the address being clearly a business address including mail stop and office number.
Spammers sometimes use various means to confirm addresses as deliverable. For instance, including a hidden Web bug in a spam message written in HTML may cause the recipient’s mail client to transmit the recipient’s address, or any other unique key, to the spammer’s Web site. [2] Users can defend against such abuses by turning off their mail program’s option to display images, or by reading email as plain-text rather than formatted.
Likewise, spammers sometimes operate Web pages which purport to remove submitted addresses from spam lists. In several cases, these have been found to subscribe the entered addresses to receive more spam. [3]
When persons fill out a form, it is often sold to a spammer using a web service or post to transfer the data. This is immediate and will drop the email in various spammer databases. The revenue made from the spammer is shared with the source. For instance, if someone applies online for a mortgage, the owner of this site may have made a deal with a spammer to sell the address. These are considered the best emails by spammers, because they are fresh and the user has just signed up for a product or service that often is marketed by spam.
Legality[edit]
In many jurisdictions there are anti-spam laws in place that restrict the harvesting or use of email addresses.
In Australia, the creation or use of email-address harvesting programs (address harvesting software) is illegal, according to the 2003 anti-spam legislation, only if it is intended to use the email-address harvesting programs to send unsolicited commercial email. [4][5] The legislation is intended to prohibit emails with ‘an Australian connection’ – spam originating in Australia being sent elsewhere, and spam being sent to an Australian address.
New Zealand has similar restrictions contained in its Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act 2007. [6]
In The United States of America, the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003[7] made it illegal to initiate commercial email to a recipient where the email address of the recipient was obtained by:
Using an automated means that generates possible electronic mail addresses by combining names, letters, or numbers into numerous permutations.
Using an automated means to extract electronic mail addresses from an Internet website or proprietary online service operated by another person, and such website or online service included, at the time the address was obtained, a notice stating that the operator of such website or online service will not give, sell, or otherwise transfer addresses maintained by such website or online service to any other party for the purposes of initiating, or enabling others to initiate, electronic mail messages.
Furthermore, website operators may not distribute their legitimately collected lists. The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 requires that operators of web sites and online services should include a notice that the site or service will not give, sell, or otherwise transfer addresses, maintained by such website or online service, to any other party for the purposes of initiating, or enabling others to initiate, electronic mail messages.
Countermeasures[edit]
Address munging
Address munging—e. g., changing “” to “bob at example dot com”—is a common technique to make harvesting email addresses more difficult. Though relatively easy to overcome—see, e. g., this Google search—it is still effective. [8][9] It is somewhat inconvenient to users, who must examine the address and manually correct it.
Images
Using images to display part or all of an email address is a very effective harvesting countermeasure. The processing required to automatically extract text from images is not economically viable for spammers. It is very inconvenient for users, who type the address in manually.
Contact forms
Email contact forms which send an email but do not reveal the recipient’s address avoid publishing an email address in the first place. However, this method prevents users from composing in their preferred email client, limits message content to plain text – and does not automatically leave the user with a record of what they’ve said in their “sent” mail folder.
JavaScript obfuscation
JavaScript email obfuscation produces a normal, clickable email link for users while obscuring the address from spiders. In the source code seen by harvesters, the email address is scrambled, encoded, or otherwise obfuscated. [8] While very convenient for most users, it does reduce accessibility, e. g. for text-based browsers and screen readers, or for those not using a JavaScript-enabled browser. [10]
HTML obfuscation
In HTML, email addresses may be obfuscated in many ways, such as inserting hidden elements within the address or listing parts out of order and using CSS to restore the correct order. Each has the benefit of being transparent to most users, but none support clickable email links and none are accessible to text-based browsers and screen readers.
CAPTCHA
Requiring users to complete a CAPTCHA before giving out an email address is an effective harvesting countermeasure. A popular solution is the reCAPTCHA Mailhide service. (Note, 12. 9. 18: Mailhide is no longer supported. )[11]
CAN-SPAM Notice
To enable prosecution of spammers under the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, a website operator must post a notice that “the site or service will not give, sell, or otherwise transfer addresses maintained by such website or online service to any other party for the purposes of initiating, or enabling others to initiate, electronic mail messages. “[12]
Mail Server Monitoring
Email servers use a variety of methods to combat directory harvesting attacks, including to refuse to communicate with remote senders that have specified more than one invalid recipient address within a short time, but most such measures carry the risk of legitimate email being disrupted.
Spider Traps
A spider trap is a part of a website which is a honeypot designed to combat email harvesting spiders. [13] Well-behaved spiders are unaffected, as the website’s file will warn spiders to stay away from that area—a warning that malicious spiders do not heed. Some traps block access from the client’s IP as soon as the trap is accessed. [14][15][16] Others, like a network tarpit, are designed to waste the time and resources of malicious spiders by slowly and endlessly feeding the spider useless information. [17] The “bait” content may contain large numbers of fake addresses, a technique known as list poisoning; though some consider this practice harmful. [18][19][20][21]
See also[edit]
Anti-spam techniques
Email spam
Web crawler
Web scraping
References[edit]
^ Arthur, Charls (2007-09-13). “Do social network sites genuinely care about privacy? “. theguardian. Retrieved 2007-10-30.
^ Heather Harreld (5 December 2000). “Embedded HTML ‘bugs’ pose potential security risk”. InfoWorld. Archived from the original on 2006-12-10. Retrieved 2007-01-06.
^ “Spam Unsubscribe Services”. The Spamhaus Project Ltd. 29 September 2005. Retrieved 2007-01-06.
^ “EFA Analysis of Australian Spam Bills 2003”. Electronic Frontiers Australia. 2003-11-01. Address Harvesting Software and Lists. Archived from the original on 2021-05-04.
^ “Australia slams the door on spam”. 2003-08-18. Archived from the original on 2007-02-03. Retrieved 2021-07-04.
^ “Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act 2007 No 7, Public Act Subpart 2—Address-harvesting software and harvested-address lists”. Archived from the original on 2021-02-17. Retrieved 2021-07-04.
^ [1]
^ a b Silvan Mühlemann, 20 July 2008, Nine ways to obfuscate e-mail addresses compared
^ Hohlfeld, Oliver; Graf, Thomas; Ciucu, Florin (2012). Longtime Behavior of Harvesting Spam Bots (PDF). ACM Internet Measurement Conference.
^ Roel Van Gils, A List Apart, 6 November 2007, Graceful Email Obfuscation
^ Mailhide: Free Spam Protection
^ “15 U. S. Code § 7704 – Other protections for users of commercial electronic mail”, Section a. 4. b. 1. A. i
^ SEO Glossary: “A spider trap refers to either a continuous loop where spiders are requesting pages and the server is requesting data to render the page or an intentional scheme designed to identify (and “ban”) spiders that do not respect ”
^ [2] A Spider Trap which bans clients which access it.
^ Thomas Zeithaml, Spider Trap: How It Works
^ Ralf D. Kloth, Trap bad bots in a bot trap
^ How to keep bad robots, spiders and web crawlers away
^ Ralf D. Kloth, Fight SPAM, catch Bad Bots: “Generating web pages with long lists of fake addresses to spoil the spam bot’s address data base is not encouraged, because it is unknown if the spammers really care and on the other hand, the use of those addresses by spammers will cause additional traffic load on network links and involved innocent third party servers. ”
^ Harvester Killer: generates fake emails and traps spiders in an endless loop.
^ “Archived copy”. Archived from the original on 2011-07-06. Retrieved 2011-02-12. CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link) A Spider Trap which generates 5, 000 fake email addresses and blocks the client from further access.
^ “Webmasters can respond to misbehaving spiders by trapping them, poisoning their databases of harvested e-mail addresses, or simply block them. ”
Frequently Asked Questions about email crawler
Is email scraping legal?
If the scraped data is publicly available, the scraping process complies with the law and is legal. Thus, email scraping is legit if you collect contacts that are available for everybody across the Net. While scraping a website for contact details, you must also check the website’s Terms of Use.Apr 25, 2021
What is email scraper?
Email harvesting or scraping is the process of obtaining lists of email addresses using various methods. Typically these are then used for bulk email or spam.
What is the best email scraper?
Top 11 Email Scrapers For MarketersZoominfo. A full-featured email scraping platform with a comprehensive database. … Skrapp.io. An integrated platform that provides from Linkedin integration, a website search, domain search to leads directory. … Octoparse. … Hunter.io. … Rocket Reach. … Prospect.io. … Sales Navigator. … Slik.More items…•Aug 3, 2021
