Scraping for email addresses - bad?

Hey Jim,

This is business at it's worst.

Avoid all crappy spammy scrappy rubbish and focus and
building a solid business that is going to be around and worth
a lot of money in 5 years from now.

One Word: Delete.

I agree! Just wish I could name and shame the individual!

There are so many other ways to get effective traffic than scraping for emails. The time, effort, and risks just are not worth it. If you are going to do email marketing, pay to send to lists that are interested and have opted in to receive what you are promoting. You will get much better results this way provided you have a good offer.

If you know for sure that this person is a member of the forum, report him to the Help Desk. The WF doesn't smile down kindly on members scraping other members' email addresses and spamming.

~Becky

Avoid at all cost!

Practice double opt-in email marketing and you can never go wrong =P

It is, yes ... but there are worse things.

Which of these two cases is worse?

(i) Someone uses scraping software to get your email address and just starts spamming you with his sales pitches without saying anything at all about how he came by your email address (i.e. what these idiots normally do), or ...

(ii) Someone uses scraping software to get your email address and then sends you an email saying "I hope you won't mind too much, but I lifted your email address from the XYZ Forum using scraping software. If that makes you uneasy, then I apologize, and if you don't reply to this, you'll never be hearing from me again anyway. Now, you'll be wondering why I've resorted to this tactic which so many people find so questionable, and whether I have a reason that justifies it: well, that's for you to judge, of course, but just hold your judgement for three minutes, if you will, because I think the next couple of paragraphs might interest you rather a lot ..."

I don't know about you, but I'd feel rather less angry at the second person. I think most people probably would, wouldn't they?

I'm not trying to defend what happened, and what Becky says above is quite right, and clearly it's bad and wrong, but there are worse things, aren't there?

It seems a little anomalous, when you think how many people do this without telling you, and mostly avoid trouble over it, for someone who has freely "owned up" (perhaps not realizing how "bad" it is) to have the book thrown at him ...

Just my perspective.

The whole just struck me as strange.

In his email he talked about how rich his system made him, etc. I emailed back asking him for some more details on his income claims and he wrote back saying that he has, in reality made nothing yet and he is totally new to the online game.

My business brings me enough money that I don't have to dabble with 'get rich' garble ever. Just thought I'd ask the opinion of others here, as I'd never consider scraping for email addresses. Talk about lazy marketing.

Anyway, thanks for your opinions!

Had a spammer contact me yesterday, in his email he said he scrapped my email but don't be mad etc etc...haha, is a unique way to approach it I guess, but yeah you shouldn't scrap any emails.

There are a few email scrapers on the forum.

Here is what you do to teach them a lesson ....

1. Signup for a free Yahoo email account.

2. Create a vacation response that automatically sends a promotional offer (or your favorite message to scrapers and spammers) when someone sends an email to that address.

3. Casually drop the email address on the forum.

4. Have a good laugh.

.

Pretty sure mass scraping of emails on websites is illegal. Is this true?

it is illegal to send commercial emails to anyone with out them giving you permission. That's why when ever you optin you have to verify by clicking the link send to your email by your auto responder..

I receive promotional emails all the time that have a disclaimer at the bottom saying that the above email is for guidance and not trying to sell anything but thats exactly what they are doing. I usually don't open them unless by accident..

Jeremy

i think i got the email too...

banned and clicked spam.. didnt even click on his link

This is a bad method by scraping emails. Most of these guys are using this method to spam people through advertising their own products, service or offers. It's better that you should build a list in a smart way.

I would suggest offering something valuable for free to gain trust and build repo among your clients, and then take it from there.

Hope it helps.

Praney

I have noticed a lot more frequent occurrences of signing up for one list and having it end up being some sort of "co-op" for lack of a better term where they think it is fully justified in making a very small mention of it somewhere in the middle of the fourth or fifth page of the ToS and then ending up receiving emails from tens or even hundreds of different marketers. Not quite as bad I suppose but still something I would never participate in as it cannot be a great confidence builder for your readers.

Scraping emails is worthless. Start from scratch, more valuable.

Yep, scraping emails is a horrible idea.

I would never advise you do that.

I read it was illegal in the U.S. to send promotional emails to email addresses you had obtained by automated scraping tools, but have never found confirmation of this. Is it?