Reviewer, 2009-01-19 07:10:00

IE Contacts Spy automatically extracts and saves contact information from every web site visited. The contacts include e-mail addresses, telephone and fax numbers, ICQ, Yahoo Messenger, AOL Instant Messenger and MSN Messenger ID numbers.

Pros: IE Contacts Spy is an Internet Explorer plug-in that can collect contact information from website pages. It can automatically collect contact information from sites visited. These details include e-mail addresses, telephone and fax numbers, ICQ, Yahoo messenger id, AOL IM id, MSN IM id and so on. To do on-line marketing, you need to find these contact information. Checking through websites is one way of doing it. However, that can be very frustrating as typically webmasters tend to hide these details or put in some obscure corner of the site so that they are hard to find. This application finds the details as it is able to search through a site very thoroughly and completely. The program works as a plug-in for MS Internet Explorer and builds itself into IE shell. There`s a set of filtering options that makes collection of right information fairly easy. You can define the kind of information to be collected. The application, for example, could display fax numbers collected over a period of time from URLs that had .net in their names for example. The way this information is collected has four fields; type of contact, actual contact data, URL and date & time of information collection.

This application can search through password protected sites as well. It can recognize and extract decrypted e-mail addresses also. The contact data can be easily exported from the program to a file, clipboard or MS Office application (MS Excel or Word, in particular). The data collected would need to be validated as it can contain some invalid items.

Cons: Most often companies do not put in addresses or contact details of important contact. Besides customer service general e-mail and other details it may typically contain addresses like sales(a)xyz.com or info(a)abc.com and generally they are not good for marketing efforts.

Overall: It does its assigned function well. It is rated 4 stars.