Is this actually email address scraping as a service? This is going to be used to enable spam. Any email sent to an address acquired from this service will be, by definition, unsolicited. Thus, if the email is in any way bulk (and honestly, what will the addresses returned from your service be used for, if not for sending substantively identical content to multiple people?), then the email fits the commonly-accepted definition of spam[1]. This is not OK, and will only make things more difficult for people who do legitimate, consent-based, email marketing.
I'm glad you're respecting robots.txt, but please say what your bot's user agent string is, so site administrators can block specifically your bot.
I'm loathe to be so negative on a "Show HN" post, but I strongly believe that this business is disreputable and that businesses of this type cause harm to the Internet. There may be value in finding blogs/bloggers matching specific queries; perhaps take email addresses out of the equation?
[1] http://www.spamhaus.org/consumer/definition/
Edited to add: just yesterday I received an email from someone I don't know asking me to try out his "weather API." The same email was clearly sent to a lot of different people, and it was sent to an address I have posted on websites, so it must have been scraped. I suspect the sender didn't think his email was spam, since he didn't try to hide his identity or use a bot net to send it. But being unsolicited and bulk, it was spam. It was sent via Mandrill so I reported it to Mandrill's abuse team; most people would probably just mark it as spam, harming the reputation of Mandrill's mail servers, thus making it more difficult for Mandrill to be used for legitimate email sending. I have a feeling "blogger outreach" would follow a similar pattern as this.
I'm glad you're respecting robots.txt, but please say what your bot's user agent string is, so site administrators can block specifically your bot.
I'm loathe to be so negative on a "Show HN" post, but I strongly believe that this business is disreputable and that businesses of this type cause harm to the Internet. There may be value in finding blogs/bloggers matching specific queries; perhaps take email addresses out of the equation?
[1] http://www.spamhaus.org/consumer/definition/
Edited to add: just yesterday I received an email from someone I don't know asking me to try out his "weather API." The same email was clearly sent to a lot of different people, and it was sent to an address I have posted on websites, so it must have been scraped. I suspect the sender didn't think his email was spam, since he didn't try to hide his identity or use a bot net to send it. But being unsolicited and bulk, it was spam. It was sent via Mandrill so I reported it to Mandrill's abuse team; most people would probably just mark it as spam, harming the reputation of Mandrill's mail servers, thus making it more difficult for Mandrill to be used for legitimate email sending. I have a feeling "blogger outreach" would follow a similar pattern as this.