email field, DMOZ EXTRACTOR

[eugejl]

What can I do to extract 'email field' from links within each category (using dmoz estractor)? Is it possible? It should be perfect if I could collect email to inform webmasters about submission in my directory...

eugejl

[inspireme]

dmoz listings dont have email addresses attached to them. As this is just reading dmoz listings and formatting them for indexU then your out of luck

[dody]

yes, dmoz does not distribute email addresses of link owner.

[zsindhu]

Try populating these fields with info@domain.com. These e-mails should be valid for 90% of the domains.

Once you have validated these links, e-mails would be sent off by IndexU letting the owners know that their links have been added. It is then up to the link owners to correct any e-mail address/description etc. they feel needs updating.

My guess is at least 70% of the people who get these e-mails would be interested in updating their info

[inspireme]

web extractor will crawl a page and pull out ~:

email, name, title, description, keywords, phone, fax and then put them into a csv format...

[JumpingCOWS.com]

What has been your experiences with web extractor? Can the CVS file easily be imported into indexu afterwards?

Thanks

Jonathan

[inspireme]

Umm, once you have the list of information you need to get it in the same format as indexU. You will have a lot of missing fields so its not a straight forward import.

Its not that it cant be done (it can) but you would need to get the data correct to avoid mucking up your DB. You would need to use phpmyadmin, or make a php script to enter all the info onto the DB.

[inspireme]

Ps.

I have never tried the import function in indexU ... maybe this can do it? dont try it on a "live site"

as I remember this has a "csv" import function.

[JumpingCOWS.com]

Try populating these fields with info@domain.com. These e-mails should be valid for 90% of the domains.

How would you do this quick and easy? Would something like info@<%url%> work in the email feild?

[inspireme]

no that would create a field that has info@http://www.whatever.com

you would have to read in the url and split it. add something along these lines to the php file (add.php in the process section - or the admin version)

email($guessaddress) = split('http://www.', $url);
$email = 'info@'."$guessaddress";

I would say howeevr that 90% of emails having a catch all address or using info@ is highly over optomistic. Loads of people have aol or ISP addresses despite having a domain name... I would guess at 20% addresses working.

ps.
that code probably wont work. Just an example.

[JumpingCOWS.com]

So you still recommend using web extractor?

Here is where I am at.. I have already done an DMOZ extraction of just over 2000 sites for my directory.. I was about to pay someone to actually manually go through each of them and get their contact info and sent out an email manually.. however if I could have a way to reach at least 90% of them with an email that can be sent out in one big swoop without investing days and weeks of time to manually get to them that would be fastastic.

I noticed ESM had some kind of addon for emailing link owners but I couldn't find any details on all it's features.

I tried using web extractor.. but I just couldn't get the settings right to hit my indexu and extract all the sites on there. And even if/when I manage to do that.. importing all those addresses into indexu would be a VERY difficult task since I would have to manually match each domain to each link id.. it's not like and can sort them alphabetically or something and then do an import in one big column.

Help please.. would love to see this work!

Jonathan

[inspireme]

If your working with existing data in your indexU database then webextractor wont be any good. I thought you were making a new database. Having said that if your comfortable with phpmyadmin you could possibly download the database as a text file and give it the list of urls to do in order, then reimport it.

I dont know what to suggest if your happy with trying to send emails to info@domain try something like I posted above...

If not your choices are
a) manually do it
b) get somebody to write a php script to read in the website, and detect the email addresses ( post on scriptlance.com ) its a fairly big job but easily do-able
c) Pay somebody else to do it
d) "creativly" Use a tool like web extractor, which will require you to muck up your database a few times before you get it right + a lot of time in phpmyadmin.

Sometimes their just a'int an easy way...

[JumpingCOWS.com]

I work with phpmyadmin all the time.. if I can do an export of the urls in their current order and then run web extractor on it to add their emails and then I guess cut and paste an INSERT command to direct it at the email feild would that do it?

[inspireme]

should do... I havent used web extractor a huge amount (a friend purchased a copy which i have played with a bit) you should be able to process a list of urls with it.

[JumpingCOWS.com]

Hey you were right.. it works like a breeze using CVS files .. easily cut and paste into the right column then voila

One thing.. how can you send out a mass mail to all of them with the info on their accounts and so on?

Thanks

Jonathan