MailSharksBot: what this crawler is

Our crawler visits websites to find the contact address a company has published itself. Here is how it behaves and how to ask it to stay away.

Who is visitingThe crawler identifies itself as MailSharksBot/1.0 with a link to this page. Any other robot, whatever it calls itself, is not ours.

What it takesContact pages only: an address a company published openly, to be contacted at. No visitor data, no private sections, no forms.

How oftenAt most five pages per site per run, with a pause between requests. You will not notice the load.

Rules it follows

robots.txt is read before every request, including Crawl-delay.
Public pages only. Nothing behind a login, nothing closed to indexing.
Role mailboxes. We collect organisation addresses — info@, sales@, contact@. Personal addresses of employees are not collected by default at all.
The source is stored. For every address we keep the page it was published on and the date, so that "where did you get my address" has an exact answer.

How to block the crawler

Add this to your robots.txt:

User-agent: MailSharksBot
Disallow: /

The crawler reads it on its next visit and stops coming. You do not need to write to us for that.

How to have your address removed

Write to us from the address to be removed, or name it in the message. We delete it and add it to the suppression list so a later run cannot pick it up again. You will get a substantive reply within a few days.

The same goes for any email you received from us: every one of them carries an unsubscribe link, and after it there will be no more.

Who is responsible

MailSharks is a sending service: emails go out from the customer's own mailbox, under their name. The customer runs the contact search themselves and decides whether to write. Questions about a particular email go to the sender in the "From" field; questions about the crawler itself go to us.