Hi

Firstly, apologies to Graham, I know I shouldn't ask for a solution, but I'm really short on time on this one, hope you don't mind me asking:

What I'm after is a program which can scan as many places as possible for any email addresses for 1 particular company.

Perhaps if I explain why, I ordered goods (a complete kitchen) from this particular company over 5 weeks ago for a 3 week delivery period, well now 2 weeks over that and they can't seems to find it.  Whats worse all we are get is fobbe doff with we're looking into it, then no one gets back to us.

What I want to be able to do is grab as many email addresses as possible, send a breif email with our problem and see what response we get to that.  I think the best term is "If you throw enough S**t at the wall some should stick"

Again if anyone can help it would be much appreciated.

Thanks

Chris

PS. I don't want to sham this particular company in public so I won't name ****... opps.. just slipped out....

PPS. Graham/Mods, if this is an unsuitable post please delete.


I *have* taken out the company name ... as there's a good general discussion here that I think would be constrained by being too specific. I'm on site training today ... no chance for a full answer but I will follow up tonight

I don't know about the particular company's web site you refer to, but these days many just publish generic email addresses for departments and / or only provide web forms.  It's just too easy otherwise for people who want to advertise anything from flea powder to casinos to build up a huge and annoying directory.  

I do appreciate your desire to do a "trawl" and write to a lot of people  but I have to say that I don't think it's likely to be the most effective if you automate it.  We've got about half a dozen email addresses on our site - three personal ones and three "generic" that go to whichever team members are in that part of the business.  If I receive an email to both my personal address and also to one of the generic addresses, I'll tend to give it less attention than if it came to just one address.  And if it  addresses me by name and the author cleary knows something about who he's writing to, it gets even more attention.

Back to your original question - I might in some cases of an extremely hard to navigate web site use a crawler / spider;  there's one in an old issue of "Of Course" that we used to see if a static site had changes from time to time (we were watching a former student who had been advertising courses  that seemed remarkably like ours to make sure the rip-off courses didn't reappear).  Issue 6 of Spring 2003, available for download at our download centre.


Thanks for the reply, I'll look at the link as soon as I get home.

The main reason I wanted to do a trawl is I did try looking through the website, but they don't seem to have any email addresses available, generic or otherwise, and out of desperation I just wanted to contact someone.

Good news is we went into the store and managed to pin down a manager who we *hope* will get things moving.

Thanks again for trying.

Chris

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