How to: Using Python and Google to find hundreds of e-mail adresses

Please note that this article is only a proof of concept and it may only be used for studying and learn how easily spammers can retrieves e-mail adresses by using Google and a simple Python script.
For those to whom the idea would cross the mind, remember that Christopher William Smith, often reffered as the king of spam, has recently been sentenced to 30 years of jail…

Well, enough discussion, let’s see what we are interested to know the code itself:

#!/usr/bin/python

import sys
import re
import string
import httplib
import urllib2
import re

def StripTags(text):
    finished = 0
    while not finished:
        finished = 1
        start = text.find("<")
        if start >= 0:
            stop = text[start:].find(">")
            if stop >= 0:
                text = text[:start] + text[start+stop+1:]
                finished = 0
    return text

if len(sys.argv) != 2:
        print "\nrsx.py : Find hundreds of e-mail adresses on Google.\n"
        print "\nUsage : ./rsx.py
\n"
        print "\nexemple: ./rsx.py gmail.com \n"
        sys.exit(1)

domain_name=sys.argv[1]
d={}
page_counter = 0
try:
    while page_counter <400:
        results = 'http://groups.google.com/groups?q='+str(domain_name)+'&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&start=' + repr(page_counter) + '&sa=N'
        request = urllib2.Request(results)
        request.add_header('User-Agent','Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.0)')
        opener = urllib2.build_opener()
        text = opener.open(request).read()
        emails = (re.findall('([\w\.\-]+@'+domain_name+')',StripTags(text)))
        for email in emails:
            d[email]=1
            uniq_emails=d.keys()
        page_counter = page_counter +10
except IOError:
    print "No result found!"+""
page_counter_web=0
try:
    print "\n\n+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++"+""
    print "+ Results:"+""
    print "+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++\n\n"+""

    while page_counter_web >400 :
        results_web = 'http://www.google.com/search?q=%40'+str(domain_name)+'&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&start=' + repr(page_counter_web) + '&sa=N'
        request_web = urllib2.Request(results_web)
        request_web.add_header('User-Agent','Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.0)')
        opener_web = urllib2.build_opener()
        text = opener_web.open(request_web).read()
        emails_web = (re.findall('([\w\.\-]+@'+domain_name+')',StripTags(text)))
        for email_web in emails_web:
            d[email_web]=1
            uniq_emails_web=d.keys()
        page_counter_web = page_counter_web +10

except IOError:
    print "No results found!"+""
for uniq_emails_web in d.keys():
    print uniq_emails_web+""

This command line program should be launched this way (assuming you named the file rsx.py):

python rsx.py gmail.com

It’s impressing to see how many e-mail adresses you can find with only 67 lines of code!