USENET BULK EMAIL EXTRACTOR: Start your own bulk emailing service! This script interfaces with your newserver to extract email addresses from usenet posts. Simply select your usenet groups and run the script. Targeted email lists are currently worth $200/

Preliminaries

Determine the path to PERL 5 on your web server host. Note that some web hosting companies run both PERL 4 and PERL 5. Make ABSOLUTELY sure you are not setting this up under PERL 4. Ask your administrator if you are not sure.

Unpack the zip archive on your desktop using a program like WINZIP. If you don't have such a program then download WINZIP FREE from SHAREWARE.COM.

After you have unpacked the archive you will have a collection of folders and files on your desktop. Now you have to do some basic editing of each of these files (or at least some of them). Use a text editor such as wordpad, notepad, BBEdit, simpletext, or teachtext to edit the files. These are NOT WORD PROCESSOR DOCUMENTS they are just simple TEXT files so don't save them as word processor documents or save them with extentions such as .txt or they will NOT WORK. Note that there may be a some files inside of folders which are "blank". This is normal.

Preparing the CGI scripts

Define Path To PERL 5

The first step is to open up each and every file that has a .cgi extention and edit line number one of each script. Each of the cgi scripts is written in perl 5. For your scripts to run they must know where perl 5 is installed on your web server. The path to perl 5 is defined to a cgi script in the first line of the file. In each of the cgi scripts the first line of code looks something like this:

#!/usr/bin/perl

If the path to perl 5 on your web server is different from /usr/bin/perl you must edit the first line of each cgi script to reflect the correct path. If the path to perl 5 is the same no changes are necessary. If you do not know the path to perl 5 ask the webmaster or system administrator at your server site.

Configure the .cgi files

getgroups.cgi and xtractor.cgi

This script REQUIRES you to have a usenet NEWS ACCOUNT with a service provider that allows remote logins. Your account will have a unique logid (username) and password. You need to set the variables $username and $password to your username and password in both getgroups.cgi and xtractor.cgi

$username = "put your username here";

$password = "put your password here";

File Access Permissions

File access permissions must be set correctly for this program to run. The table below lists the permissions of each file which are to be set by the unix command ( chmod ) used to set the correct access permissions. You must set the access permissions for each of these files.

CHMOD 755

CHMOD 777

getgroups.cgi

xtractor.cgi

emails

newsgroups

Get newsgroup list

Before extracting email addresses you must create a list of newsgroups. To do this you may simply edit the file "newsgroups" by hand or run the getgroups.cgi script from telnet. getgroups.cgi will retrieve the ENTIRE LIST of available newsgroups

perl getgroups.cgi

Get emails

After your list of newsgroups has been created simply run xtractor.cgi from telnet and the script will crawl through the entire list of newsgroups and extract every available email address. This list is stored inside of the file called emails.

perl xtractor.cgi