Hi there,

Thank you for your comment. Gimme Email is not intended as a "Spam" utility, but rather as a tool to help small business owners collect their own customer's emails and build newsletter lists from those who have asked to be contacted in the past.

I reject the notion that this is a "Spam" program, when that label depends on how you use the program and not on the capabilities of it. Many of our current customers who've purchased Gimme Email are using it to recover damaged email lists and sort through large amounts of data to find email addresses from past clients and email subscribers.

Again, just because Gimme Email CAN be used to collect emails for the purpose of spamming does not make it a Spam utility. You've heard of Limewire right? (One among many file sharing apps) Just because it CAN be used to download commercial content illegally does not mean you should do it, and it certainly does not make Limewire an indecent application. Also, you may wish to know that after having put over 100 hours of my time developing this application, I think your comment is rude at best.

Thanks for your quick dismissal and unfounded insult.

@ORBITERAPPS

"Thank you for your comment. Gimme Email is not intended as a "Spam" utility, but rather as a tool to help small business owners collect their own customer's emails and build newsletter lists from those who have asked to be contacted in the past."

Okay, how is that NOT spam? I personally will not shop at places that aggressively sign me up to newsletters or clog up my inbox in unsolicited junk. And it looks like you are helping them upset customers.

Value and respect peoples privacy. Make your money with more sensible and socially responsible programming. As others have said, this is spam software. MU should take a firm stance against promoting these types of products...

PRHELLSTROM,
When applied against URLs, the email address harvester is a key weapon in the spammers' arsenal. There are harvesters out there, particularly in the IBM community, that pull email addresses out of images in order to circumvent harvester countermeasures.

Having been a victim of a coordinated spammer attack several years ago, (which took me almost a year to recover from), I use extreme anti-harvester countermeasures to deny my real email address from the spammer community. I use many unique email addresses, so if an addressee publishes my email address on a webpage, I'm able to pinpoint the exact leak and the exact webmaster that allowed my email address to become compromised; then I block him.

Are internal data losses so common that users need to buy an email address harvester to re-instate a lost email address list? Why aren't those users using backup servers?

Why aren't email addresses derived from a webmaster's "subscribe to my newsletter" solicitation sufficient? Users voluntarily join (on their own initiative) the webmaster's list. Isn't this adequate?

Why can't harvester-developers implement measures to discourage use by spammers, eg. throttling, requiring target webmaster permission to harvest (in advance of the harvesting session,) limiting URLs harvested at a time, etc?" Why can't the harvester seller screen potential customers against listings of known spammers?

The congressional "can spam" law in the US was touted to stop spamming once and for all. Spammers laugh at it, all it did was stop the states from prosecuting spammers.

Finally, if an email is sent, for the first time, to an addressee harvested from a web page, and without that addressee's prior knowledge, isn't this spam? On the other hand, if a clueless addressee leaves his real email address on a web page or newsgroup, he'll find out the consequences very quickly.

It would be a spam utility if it could scan entire websites and many more of things (try to think as a very busy man which must spam one million people every day). Otherwise, this seems a desktop application useful for a very concrete task.