E-mail harvester

An e-mail harvester or spambot is a program ( bot ) that searches the Internet specifically for e-mail addresses (including telephone numbers) or blogs in order to send advertising ( spam ) to them. Some web crawlers are able to crawl websites on the World Wide Web , as well as newsgroups and chat conversations . Since e-mail addresses follow a uniform format, spambots are comparatively easy to write.

To avoid spam e-mails, various procedures are used to prevent a spambot from recognizing e-mail addresses. These are described in more detail in the article Spam .

Web links

• Stopping Spambots - A Spambot Trap - Using Linux, Apache, mod_perl, Perl, MySQL, iptables and Embperl
• The top 10 spam bot user agents you MUST block. NOW. List of current spambots, email harvesters and cloaked bots.
• E-mail address harvesting explained ( Memento from April 19, 2014 in the Internet Archive )