Email Harvester

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What Does Email Harvester Mean?

An email harvester is a piece of software that uses various means to collect email addresses from public data. These technologies include different types of bots and spiders that crawl areas or forums like USENET, Craigslist or other web areas to acquire email addresses for mailing lists or spam, as well as other purposes.

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An email harvester is also known as an address harvester.

Techopedia Explains Email Harvester

Different types of email harvesters are available, including open-source email harvesters and proprietary pieces of software. They may be transferred or sold on certain “black hat” internet sites. Some were built for specific websites such as Craigslist or Facebook. Those who are looking to collect bulk email addresses can also use things like a directory harvest attack to mine email addresses, or simply buy lists from other parties. The issue of email harvesting and bulk email sending raises concerns about internet privacy and what is considered ethical on the web.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology expert
Margaret Rouse
Technology expert

Margaret is an award-winning writer and educator known for her ability to explain complex technical topics to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret’s idea of ​​a fun day is to help IT and business professionals to learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.