Talk:Email-address harvesting

Move more discussion from E-mail spam to this article?
I notice that the E-mail spam's section on address harvesting appears to be longer and more complete than this article. Maybe more of the discussion there should be moved here? Wrs1864 04:00, 20 December 2006 (UTC)

offering free items to get email addresses?
Sounds like original research to me; I thought the owners of those sites were more interested in getting referral cash from the few that do sign up for the offers? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 194.80.176.253 (talk) 02:13, 21 January 2007 (UTC).

CAN-SPAM Does make certain harvesting illegal
My info was correct. Not sure why someone thought that CAN-SPAM didn't address harvesting, when I explained how it did. I reverted the info. I also removed arguments against the anti-harvesting methods. If you want to start adding such things, we should create a new article on anti e-mail address harvesting methods and add any weaknesses to a weaknesses or vulnerabilities section. bitserve 19:41, 25 July 2007 (UTC) but how do people get these programs? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 217.43.111.127 (talk) 16:23, 3 October 2007 (UTC)

Informationally correct, but it's questionable as to whether making harvesting illegal achieves anything, or even if it's enforceable. A browser and a harvesting 'bot both issue an HTTP GET request to the webserver, collect the resulting data stream and save it to local memory. What is done with the data past that point is unknown and unknowable as far as the source is concerned. Thus, if harvesting is illegal, then surely browsing must also be illegal as the method of acquiring the data is identical. --Anteaus (talk) 17:19, 6 April 2011 (UTC)

The second bullet under the US legality is very unclear - is it always illegal to use an automated means to extract web addresses from websites operated by another person? Or is the rest of that paragraph trying to limit the specific circumstances when it is illegal?

Should mention Legitimate uses of Harvesting?
The article content only discusses the negative aspects of email harvesting. I would assume that most email address harvesting is for spam. However there are legitimate reasons for harvesting email addresses - that is business intelligence as well as other intelligence gathering. This could be used to know the players involved for negotiations, purchasing, background for understanding an organizations capabilities. This could be used for investment analysis. Who are the players involved and then do research on those players. Granted key executives are normally listed on company pages but not all employees are. All of this business intelligence would not be "spam" as no emails would be sent.

Should the article discuss the "legitimate or legally acceptable" reasons for email address harvesting?

Ragould (talk) 17:06, 9 May 2016 (UTC) ragould

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