Email harvesting of a domain using Linux Backtrack

A while ago I wanted to scan which email addresses can be found by spambots because that domain received a lot of spam. You can prevent users from capturing your email addresses from your website by encrypting the characters with html or javascript. This tools can encrypt your email address with javascript http://hivelogic.com/enkoder/ and this website http://www.wbwip.com/wbw/emailencoder.html does this through using character entities.

To do an email harvesting scan you need to have Linux Backtrack installed. I installed this by using VirtualBox on my mac (which is free). You can download Backtrack 5 from their website.

Start of with opening the terminal in Backtrack and type msfconsole

After that type search_collector

This will show the available modules. Next you need to choose to use the search_email_collector module by typing use/auxiliary/gather/search_email_collector

Now type show options

Now you can set up the domain you want to scan for email addresses. You do this by typing set domain http://www.example.com

That’s it. You can now run the scan by doing run

This will output all found email addresses from your domain.

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