Greetings,

I wrote my own email address spider/farming software a few years back that worked with Google and Yahoo. It worked real well and I had good success for many months. But in the last year I found that it's just too risky now to farm emails and send them to people. There is a HUGE anti-spam movement that is very unsympathetic for any sort of email farming. One bad email and you can get your server blocked or added to an open relay black list.

If you are serious about it, 90% of the work is figuring out why the email is on the page and who the email address is for. Is it for the webmaster, a customer on a forum, an officer of the company, or is it a deliberate plant designed to catch people using email farming software. The main problem is just because you can grab an email from a website doesn't mean it will be a decision maker or someone who cares about what you are offering. You also will need to do something to make sure you don't send an email to many people in the same company. Often companies will have a page where they list their officers and their email addresses. These pages are sure fire trouble if you don't make sure to weed out the extra emails.

My personal advice would be to consider a different business model that doesn't require pulling bulk emails and then sending out un-solicited email letters. You will most certainly find people that will add your name to a spam list if you do it for any length of time. Many webmasters maintain that their email address is for customers only and consider any un-solicited emails spam regardless of how focused it may be. Even without using a spider and taking the time to obtain very targeted emails by hand you will find some people that will become very upset no matter what your approach.

I'm not sure exactly what you are trying to sell but my advice would be either to buy the email lists from a reputable source or take a more hands on approach.

If you're still interested and would like to make your own, you will want to use regular expressions to find the links and email address and extract it from the pages. You will need to extract links for the spidering part of the application. Regular expressions are 1000 times easier than trying to write a parsing routine in VFP. Plus you will find there are already regular expressions written to extract email addresses and links. VFP offers a regular expression wrapper in the FFC library that works very well. There are many tutorials for reg exp on the web. For pulling the pages you can use the web browser object or Internet transfer control.

I wrote my own newsletter subscriber thing myself. It's very easy if you know a little bit of ASP and I like the flexibility I get.

Good luck!

Greg

>Hey gang,
>
>Two questions -
>
>1. Anybody know of any VFP e-mail address farming software that lets you farm e-mail addresses when you supply some keywords, like in a search engine, so you can grab e-mail addresses for specific industries or interests?
>
>2. Anybody have a recommendation for a FREE subscriber e-mail sign-up form for a website? For example, where you go to a website and find a place to sign-up for a FREE newsletter or eZine. Then periodically the website sends out their eZine newsletters and information to subscribers who leave their e-mail address and password. Only I want to be the e-mail address collector and sender of the information to subscribers.
>
>I would like to do these as inexpensively as possible, but so far I haven't found anything I like that's FREE. You get what you pay for? Or maybe I can write my own in VFP, but I would think I might be reinventing the wheel. Huh?
>
>Thanks for the info.
>
>Steve Kramer