Scraped list
A list of addresses collected automatically from websites and directories without the owners' knowledge. Harvesting is illegal under several anti-spam laws.
What it means
The FTC's CAN-SPAM guide lists harvesting email addresses, or generating them through a dictionary attack, among the practices that can bring criminal penalties. Project Honey Pot exists to catch harvesters, noting that harvesting addresses from websites is illegal under several anti-spam laws, and M3AAWG lists addresses harvested from websites among the ways spam traps end up on lists; pristine trap hits are frequently the result of web harvesting.
Scraped addresses carry no permission, can include traps planted to catch harvesters, and Spamhaus says a permission pass cannot be used to legitimise a harvested list.
In the EU, an address scraped from a public page is still personal data, and the person must be informed within a month or at the first contact.
Related terms
Sources
What this definition rests on. The wording is ours; the facts are theirs.
- FTC: CAN-SPAM Act, a compliance guide for businessftc.gov
- Project Honey Pot: About usprojecthoneypot.org
- M3AAWG: Help! I hit a spam trap! (February 2023)m3aawg.org
- Spamhaus: Permission pass, what, how and when to usespamhaus.org
- EUR-Lex: Regulation (EU) 2016/679 (GDPR)eur-lex.europa.eu
All 432 terms in the glossaryThe wiki: blocklists and bounce codes