In online advertising, contact scraping is the practice of obtaining access to a customer's e-mail account in order to retrieve contact information that is then used for marketing purposes.
The New York Times refers to the practices of Tagged, MyLife and desktopdating.net as "contact scraping".[1]
Several commercial packages are available that implement contact scraping for their customers, including ViralInviter, TrafficXplode, and TheTsunamiEffect.[2]
Contact scraping is one of the applications of web scraping, and the example of email scraping tools include Uipath, Import.io, and Screen Scraper. The alternative web scraping tools include UzunExt, R functions, and Python Beautiful Soup. The legal issues of contact scraping is under the legality of web scraping.