All About Email Harvesting and How we can Harvest Emails

Email harvesting is the process of obtaining email addresses list. Usually it is used for sending bulk emails and also used for spamming. It is also the information gathering technique to collect information about the email id like phone numbers,addresses etc. . An automated process where a Bot is used to search Web pages for email addresses. The e-mail addresses are collected into a database that can be used by spammers to send unsolicited e-mail.

Usually in this case the attacker tries to send fake emails with the help of harvested emails which he had got.

For eg: The attacker harvests a corporate website for emails and  gets the email lists like jon@gmail.com,ram@gmail.com,jenifer@gmail.com who  working in ABC company .Now the attacker can send fake using the using these emails in the ABC company to gather information for further purposes etc.  

Note: This post is only for educational purpose, the author of this website will not be responsible for any misuse. 

How can we Harvest emails: So lets begin,

In this post I am using Email harvesting technique on IIT Bombay http://www.iitb.ac.in/

Step 1> Load on your Backtrack Machine,open terminal and type msfconsole and Hit enter .

Step 2> Type  search collector and hit enter.

Step 3> Now we are collecting emails, Type:

Use auxiliary/gather/search_email_colector

Step 4> Now Type: Show options and hit enter 

This is used to view your current settings .

Step 5> Now Type: set domain iitb.ac.in

If you want the output file in the txt format 

Type: set outfile ABC.txt , this will store all the email addresses in the ABC file

Step 6> Now the last step is to exploit 

Type: exploit and hit enter

So we get the emails, now attacker can use these emails for spamming and also can use these emails for information gathering.