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I'm planning to write an automated tool that will get some informations about a service being sold on auctions sites and send an email to the owner of the website to ask if he wants to also post on my service.

I looked for words like "scraping" and "crawl" in their Terms of Service and Policies to verify if there were some interdiction about it and didn't find them.

Moreover, I won't steal the data, but ask the customer if he wants to post the same data on my service. So the user will have to submit a (pre-filled) form in order to submit his domain on my service.

But still, I'm wondering if I'm allowed to do that. Moreover, is it possible that the auction service can sue me directly or will they first send me a cease and desist letter?

Thank you for your help.

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Copyright is only one of your concerns.

You don't have a relationship with the user and you are sending them an automated email - that's the textbook definition of "spamming" and it's illegal almost everywhere in the world.

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  • yeah, you're right, I was so focused on the technique I forgot about that :/
    – Cyril N.
    Commented Jul 20, 2017 at 11:40
  • Do you know if there would be a way to make it legal (both getting the data and reaching out to customers)? I would not send multiple emails to them (only one) and they can optout via a link at the bottom of the email.
    – Cyril N.
    Commented Jul 20, 2017 at 11:41
  • Thinking back to this, what's the difference between what you mention, and cold emailing? What I'm doing is the latest, and this doesn't seem to be illegal, am I right?
    – Cyril N.
    Commented Jul 25, 2017 at 7:06

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