In this post, I will show you how to further modify our email extractor script to inject crawling capability and collect as many targeted email list as possible.

The trick is quite simple - we are not crawling entire website and check each and every web page for email addresses. Doing this will consume a lot of bandwidth and our time. We just need to crawl web pages with targeted email listing: so as long as we know total pages to crawl, then looping from first page to last page and job is done!

First, inspect the pagination of our targeted website. In the example we use, it has page 1, 2, 3,... and "Last" page button. Pressing this button will take us to the last page, which is page 169. Each page has 10 email addresses, so we can get almost 1690 emails from this website. The total number of pages (169 at present) can be changed in future. If we want to reuse our email extractor script with minimum manual editing, it needs to be able to auto detect total pages.

In 2010, I downloaded and installed an open source internet mall (ECMALL from China) as part of my learning for internet marketing. ECMALL enabled multiple users to open web store and sell products. It also supported transactions via Paypal. It was and still is a popular open source internet mall in China and other countries.

The installation process was easy with the instructions given. With no much knowledge in PHP, I changed the language files and created an English version of ECMALL. However, after released for two months, there was not even a single person came to sign up as seller! The website was still very new and with little content, no one was able to find it through search engine. I need to decide closing down the website or find a way to attract buyers and sellers.