Webbots, Spiders, and Screen Scrapers, 2nd Edition

Chapter 15. Webbots That Send Email

In Chapter 14 you learned how to create webbots that read email. In this chapter I’ll show you how to write webbots that can create massive amounts of email. On that note, let’s talk briefly about email ethics.

Email, Webbots, and Spam

Spam has negatively influenced all of our email experiences.^[47] It was only a few years ago that every message in my email’s inbox had some value and deserved to be read. Today, however, my spam filter (a proxy service that examines email headers and content to determine if the email is legitimate or a potential scam) rejects over 80 percent of the email I receive, flagging it as unwanted solicitation at best and, at worst, a phishing attack—email that masquerades itself as legitimate ...