Introduction
These tools are a great little way for you to gather real email addresses in a specific niche which you can then use in an email marketing campaign down the line. GSA Email Spider and GSA Email Verifier go hand in hand with one doing the finding part of the process and the other filtering out the bad ones. Let's get started:
1. GSA Email Spider
Once you start it up, there is a setup wizard that takes you through the necessary steps to get you started. I'm going to skip this wizard and show you how to set it up in more detail. Click on the "Cancel" button to take you straight to the main dashboard.
Keywords
First up is the keywords section. You can manually enter in a list here separating each keyword with a space, or you can add a text file containing a list of keywords. In this example, I will be searching for a list of letting agents based in the UK. You want to add as many keywords as possible here to really narrow down the search to the emails you really want.
Now you've got your list together it's time to look at the other settings:
"How many search results to parse" - The maximum amount of results that you can parse at a time is 1000.
Parse results for new sublinks (else only for mails) - Ticking this box will get email spider to search the sublinks of the search engines as well which opens you up to more results.
Use URL as Start
You can use URLs individually to get email addresses and phone numbers. If this is a particularly big site or forum you can start a search on that site alone, with the option to further search for links on the subpages which can then take you to other external sites which can also be parsed.
Next up is the options section.
The best way to set this up is working your way through each of the options tabs:
Program Behaviour - In this section is where you select what information you are scraping for. Email spider gives you the option for e-mails, phone numbers, and fax. In this example, we are just going to search for emails but you can select which is relevant to you. There is also the option to select a maximum number of emails collected from the same site. You can leave the rest as default and head into the filter section.
There is an option to select the maximum number of emails collected from the same site. After these settings, you can just leave the rest as default and head into the filter section.
Filter - Email spider can filter out a lot of the spam that can come from scraping search engines for emails. It's a good idea to keep all of the default filters in place. To add your own filters, right click on the space and add your own individually or you can import a text list(.txt) just like the keyword section. The default filters should remove most of the spam but you could also add in any extra words that you want to remove to further improve the accuracy of the search.
Search Engines - This section lets you select which search engines email spider will use to find your emails, so you want to only choose the ones relevant to you. For this example, I am looking for letting agents in the UK so I would select all of the UK search engines and leave out the rest. Next up is keywords.
Keywords - This section can be left as default, but here is where you could filter out certain words and add in others that might be relevant to your search.
Extra Data - You can take extra data from the sites that the emails have been found. For example, you may want the domain name from each of the URLs or the country of the site it was found on. One thing to note though is that adding any of this extra information to your search can increase the amount of time it can take to search and will demand more of your computers CPU so if you don't really need this info then just skip this section.
Auto Mailer - Email spider has it's own mailing service that can automatically send out emails to the ones that you find. Although this is quite a nice feature for better results in your email marketing you should just store the emails for now and use mailing software like MailChimp or Aweber.
Proxy - When using any kind of scraping tool you need to use proxies for effective results. You can buy proxies from a number of sites and I really recommend you get at least 20 to make your scrapes worthwhile. You can enter them manually or click on the "Configure" button which will then take you to the screen you see above where you add the list. Next test your proxies and once they're ready you can now begin your search.
Starting your project
To begin your search click on the "start" button on the main dashboard.
Once it's begun you can take a look at URLs in the queue, in there you will see all of the sites that email spider is scraping through. It's a good idea to have a look at them when you start the project to make sure that the domains look correct. If you see a list of URLs that look spammy then you can stop the project and find out what is causing the problem.
Once you're satisfied with how it's looking and you see results coming in you can leave this running in the background as it may take some time to finish up.
After it's complete you should see a list of email addresses in the "found items" section. At the bottom of the page click on the "save" button to save your list into a text file.
As you can see from the screenshot above, you can separate all of the results into their own lists of emails, phone numbers etc. I was just searching for emails only in this project so I would click on that option which will then let you choose where to save your list to and what to call it. I have saved the list as "letting agents emails.txt" in my documents folder which I will then need for the next section of this tutorial.
2. GSA Email Verifier
Now that you have your list of emails you need to filter out the ones that don't work. The easiest way to to this is by using GSA email verifier.
This tool pings each of the email addresses for a response and allows you to easily remove those that don't work. Even though email spider has filtered out a lot of spam it's important that you do this extra check as you will still find quite a lot of emails that are no longer active etc.
To start, click on the import button.
This will open up the options to add your email list. The easiest way to do it is, click "Text file", add the .txt file that you made earlier. Once you've loaded your list it's time to start verifying.
You have the option of either Quick Test or Full Test. The quick test will ping the email server to see if it's working and the full test will connect to the SMTP server. I would definitely suggest that you carry out the full test as you want to narrow down your list to the best emails possible.
Once the test finishes a box will automatically appear with the options you have to export the results.
I would suggest you only take the email addresses that are valid but quite a few of the "Unsure E-Mails" will be okay as well. You can choose to export the file as text or CSV. In the "How to save" section, make sure you uncheck the box that saves the verification status/date. This is an unnecessary bit of information that will prevent you from importing the file as it is into mailing software down the line. Next, choose your filename which in this case I called "letting agents emails verified.txt" and click save.
Summary
That's you now got your finalised list of emails that are ready to be imported into any mailing software. These tools will save you a massive amount of time in your email marketing campaign, having the ability to gather a whole array of emails in any specific niche without the long task of sifting through websites individually is extremely helpful, giving you the time to work on other aspects of your marketing strategy.