The programs that search Web pages and/or filter newsgroup traffic looking for email addresses in order to unload unsolicited advertising (or worse). Address, Internet There are two kinds of addresses that are widely used on the Internet. One is a person's e-mail address. See Address, e-mail. The other is the address of a Web site, which is known as its URL. See Address, web site. Address, e-mail The specific location of a person's electronic mailbox on the Internet. An e-mail address typically consists of a variation of the person's name followed by an @ symbol followed by the domain of the service on which the electronic mailbox is stored. E-mail addresses are usually all lowercase letters.

a robot that searches web pages and/or filters netnews traffic looking for valid email addresses

An Address Harvester is a robot that scans or "crawls" websites, Net news, forums etc. for anything that looks like a valid email address. This results in large amounts of email addresses which will be used to send out spam, or sold to spammer.