Re: making the most of site visitor information

From: Ziana Astralos (ziana@extrotech.net)
Date: Sun Jul 06 2003 - 16:24:17 MDT

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    Quoting "Extropian Agroforestry Ventures Inc." <megao@sasktel.net>:
    > ...
    > Along the way I have captured a list of visitors to my site that
    > includes the IP address and hostname.
    > Can these be translated into a link to email the original sender?
    > ...
    > This should be an easy question to at least one of you,

    Unfortunately, it's an easy question with an answer of 'no'.

    A user's email address is not in any way linked with their IP address
    and/or the hostname that IP resolves to. In many cases they may have
    some similarities, but nowhere near enough to allow you to figure out
    the actual email address from just that information. And then there's
    people like me who use email accounts entirely unrelated to where we
    access the Internet from (that's where the IP comes from), and people
    who use free web services for email, such as yahoo and hotmail, which
    also have no connection to their means of Internet access.

    Additionally, while it might be handy to you, the ability to figure
    out someone's email address just from them visiting a person's website
    would be an absolute disaster for Internet privacy. ;-)

    > PS- I use a little freebie visitor watcher called statcounter
    > ...

    Another one I'd recommend is http://www.extreme-dm.com/tracking/?reg
    if you want more features (not sure exactly what statcounter offers). 

    -- 
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