in reply to Reaped: Perl Programs that can retrieve email addresses from web pages

For the life of your job and your company, you DON'T want to do this.

Gathering e-mails off of a page is paramount to creating "spamware", and there's a ton of that already going around causing ISP's to kick the creators off the net. It's just not tolerated. It'll get you blackholed and blackballed for life.

Instead, go to Mail Abuse Prevention Services and also Abuse.net. Also drop by news.admin.net-abuse.email on Usenet and ask for pointers on generating a confirmed opt-in mailing list.

Update: If you want to see how bad it affects the network, then Read about how two guys were sentenced to two years in jail for causing near-havoc with spam. AOL, AT&T, Mindspring, etc were all affected.

--
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.keenspace.com";

  • Comment on Re: Perl Programs that can retrieve email addresses from web pages

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Re: Perl Programs that can retrieve email addresses from web pages
by vtprogrammer (Friar) on Jan 04, 2001 at 19:18 UTC
    Guess next time I ask a question I'll do it anonymously. This is what a client asked us to do for people who ordered something from there web site. And only those people, thanks for the, um, suggestions on what to do and not to do. I probably should've mentioned that this was for a client before but I was short on time. Thanks again and I'll let my company know the response I got and we'll talk to the client on how to approach this and see if they still want to do it.
[reply]
      This still sounds like it might be a clunky solution to whatever the root problem is. What I would have like to have seen in the original question is more specificity about the requirements. Because most of the information was actually in the title of the question, we were left to assume the details of the requirements for ourselves.

      If someone is ordering something via your client's website, you do not need to use any page scrapers or anything else. Simply add a field for e-mail address and an opt-out checkbox to a form during the order process. Salvadors' link below looks to be a good way to validate the email addresses. Store the valid addresses in your customer records along with the other customer data.

[reply]
      Ahh, to the meat of the problem. Definetly, scanning is bad.

      However, if your handling the ordering for the client, and they want an e-mail list, you may want to put in code to confirm those e-mails for the list itself. I have some code which I can post (it's in Perl) which can do that. I just have to remove some proprietary items, make it generic.

      Also, always include the option for signing up for the list default it to "No, I don't want to sign up". You'll get a lot less complaints that way.

      MAPS pushes these ideas, but they've been formed out of consensus by many sysadmins while being flooded with mail durring the CyberPromo "era."

      --
      $Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.keenspace.com";

[reply]
        Thanks I still have to talk it over with my company but I'll left you know and see if I can take a look at it. Thanks again
[reply]

In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom