[kwlug-disc] Help Needed.

[John Van Ostrand]

----- Original Message -----
> I have a list with many websites on it, and I need to contact them
> all.
> would it be possible to iterate through the list and do like an wget
> –R, or something and pull out the contact at domain.name , or
> info at domain.name or whichever email from contact pages and then add
> that information to the existing list.

What used to work is a whois. It can list the admin and technical contact for a domain. But today many domains have privacy set on so that those things don't display, or resolve to a obfuscated email address.

$ whois microsoft.com

A wget could work, but I don't know many sites that list the contact in email address on the first page. You could try and grep for a list called "Contact" and follow it, but you're getting deeper. And contact pages still may not list email addresses or they may be obfuscated by script or replaced with images. Grepping an entire site may get lots of other email addresses to. How would you know which one is valid?

Keep in mind what the definition of spam is and that people receiving email from you may choose to blacklist your server so you can't send email to many (perhaps even most) domains. If you use your ISP for email service you may have your Internet access blocked.

-- 
John Van Ostrand 
CTO, co-CEO 
Net Direct Inc. 
564 Weber St. N. Unit 12, Waterloo, ON N2L 5C6 
Ph: 866-883-1172 x5102 
Fx: 519-883-8533 

Linux Solutions / IBM Hardware