Harvesting Email Addresses

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mcp6453 - 21 Feb 2006 17:19 GMT

When I receive an email with 200 recipient email addresses in the "To"
field, I often contact the sender telling them to please either set up
an email distribution list or put the names in the "BCC" field so that
spammers will not harvest them. However, I just tried to harvest the
email addresses in Outlook 2000, but I was unable to get the email
addresses to copy -- just the recipient's names. Am I correct to be
concerned that the visible addresses are easy to harvest? I can double
click on each name and see the email address, but I cannot figure out a
way to extract them en masse.

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Sue Mosher [MVP-Outlook] - 21 Feb 2006 18:26 GMT

You are right to be concerned. It is not always easy to "harvest" them en masse through the UI, but it's a piece of cake for a little code, which is what a spambot installed on a recipient's computer would be using.

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Sue Mosher, Outlook MVP
Author of Configuring Microsoft Outlook 2003
http://www.turtleflock.com/olconfig/index.htm
and Microsoft Outlook Programming - Jumpstart for
Administrators, Power Users, and Developers
http://www.outlookcode.com/jumpstart.aspx

> When I receive an email with 200 recipient email addresses in the "To"
> field, I often contact the sender telling them to please either set up
[quoted text clipped - 5 lines]
> click on each name and see the email address, but I cannot figure out a
> way to extract them en masse.

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