How Spammers Find your Email Address -
and Why You are Protected Here
How Email Extractors Work
Email extractors work similar to search engine "spiders" that can read a web page's contents and HTML code and follow links to other web pages. When they encounter an email address, they save it to a list that the user will use to send bulk emails. Some programs can even extract phone numbers and postal addresses. Almost all of these programs make use of search engine results to find web sites. The user simply specifies the keywords and selects the search engine. The program will then visit the sites listed by that search engine and extract emails contained in their web pages. It is extremely easy!
Why You are Protected at Language-school-teachers.com
Email extractors can only find email addresses that exist in the web page - either in the content or in the HTML code. At Language-school-teachers.com, we don't place your email address on any of our web pages - except password protected pages that only you can access. We keep your address secure on our server and insert it into the "To" field when someone sends you an email message through the site.
How to Spot Web Pages that Expose your Information
Most community web sites today are vulnerable to email extractors. The most common method used by penpal sites and other community sites is the HTML mailto function. When a person clicks on your email link, his own email program opens with your email address in the "To" field. The text of the link may be your email address or it may not be (see the examples below). In either case, your email address exists in the HTML code, and email extractors can find it.
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In the above examples, note that when you hold your mouse over the links, mailto:yourname@email.com appears in the status bar at the bottom of your browser (this indicator is sometimes disabled by the web page). And when you click on the links, your own email program opens with the email address inserted into the "To" field. Both of these examples use the following line of HTML code <a href="mailto:yourname@email.com"> containing your email address and can easily be found by email extractors.
Another common method people use to make contacts is to go to a community website and simply write their email address into bulletin boards or in their personal profile. Of course, people who create email extractors know this and make sure their programs do a good job of crawling bulletin boards, forums and newsgroups.
Some Email Extractors
Read about the features of some email extractors from the vendors themselves.
Advanced Email Extractor
Newsgrouper
Email catcher&sender
Links Suite III
See the Google search engine results for email extractor.
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