How to use email address extractors

Article from April, 9th, 2003.

Email addresses extractor is a program that "pulls out" email addresses from various types of media - CDs, DVDs, Internet, files on your computer and so on. So the first question you should ask yourself when looking for an extractor is what type of media you will use for "harvesting emails." All examples that will be provided here are real software titles typical for their classes and highly regarded on the market. You can download trial version of each of these titles and see how they work.

All extractors can be divided into three large groups:

1. CD/DVD extractors;
2. Internet email harvesters;
3. and extractors that pull out emails from files.

The software of the first class is represented by programs like Atomic CD Email Extractor. Frequently, trade directories, industry databases, yellow pages, and other similar types of publications can be found on CDs/DVDs. You can extract necessary emails quickly and painlessly if you use Atomic CD Email Extractor or similar software. The program automatically determines how many drives are connected to your computer and can either start reading all of them or only the ones you specify. You can stop the process any time. The application automatically skips graphics and music files, as well as some other types of files. This significantly speeds up the process of extracting emails. The program saves all found emails in the file you specify; you also have an option to save all extracted addresses to clipboard, or Microsoft Word and Excel. Atomic CD Email Extractor is a great way to extract e-mails from your address book, which is often backed up on CDs.

Internet email harvesters are well represented by Atomic Email Hunter and similar software. This is how Atomic Email Hunter works - you type in URL and the program gathers the email addresses from that webpage. Or you can type a keyword or keywords and the program will find top ranking pages to extract emails from. This is very effective method, yet very easy - just type a keyword or a phrase related to you business, like "hotels", "bicycle", "Dallas autodealers", "Computer retailers", "New York restaurants", etc. You can specify filters for scanning depth and paths. The program supports multi-threaded page loading and can work quietly in the background, consuming very little system resources. All you need to run this program is a connection to the Internet and a computer with Windows 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000 or XP installed.

The last type of extractors is composed the programs that extract email addressess from files on your computer. These files may me temporary Internet files, text files, even executable files. One example of such programs is Atomic Email Logger. Your hard-drive may be a source of hundreds, even thousands of emails. You just have to be a little bit creative. Using this program is just as easy as the previous two. You just specify files, folders or drives and the program gathers emails for you.

Next week: Images in email - troubleshooting
Prev week: The message. The Does and Don'ts

Relevant links:

  • Grab email addresses on the Web
  • Harvest email in your local files
  • How to garther email addresses?

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