anyway to gather all registered users/commenters email adresses?

Michael, you misunderstood my posts. I’m against spam. I support your crusade against spam. My mind is a poodle compared to yours.

Legitimate emails between a blogger and a commenter are not spam, in my unpopular opinion. Apparently I touched a nerve. Legitimate emails — to me — are not unsolicited, not commercial, not a newsletter – just an exchange of ideas between a blogger and a blog’s readers, as with a support email, an event that interests the readers, a response to a comment, etc.

Perhaps I see this differently than some because the only commenters on my blogs are Registered users, and none of them (the few dozen that there are) have ever complained about getting email from me.

“Almost every blog is set up that you have to enter the email in order to be able to comment. Not to register – just to post a comment. Which is fine, just don’t send me un-requested newsletters!”

The WP bloggin platform (like most) asks for an email address. Why do you suppose the developers chose to record that piece of information in the database in the first place? To put it another way:

Q: Why would you design a piece of software that prompts for your email address, just so you can comment?
A: Because the email address is useful information to the website operator, that’s why.

Everyone who places comments on a blog is aware of that, surely?

Those who don’t trust the website operator will then choose to enter a bogus or (munged) email address, but the whole purpose of email addresses for comments is surely for the website operator to contact the commenter and the commenter knows that. Provided the website operator doesn’t give out those email addresses to a third party they are fully entitled to contact all commenters, even if they do it as a “mass mailing”. The only issue I would have is if that email was spam.

Hmmm. I personally consider it simply another way of verifying a “real person” as opposed to a ‘bot. But I guess that’s just me….

I would NEVER harvest emails from the many blogs I and my clients run to mass mail. It’s just not done by upfront, class sites.

I too don’t believe in “harvesting” the email addresses. But I guess we disagree on the purpose of the email address field. You see it as a verification mechanism and I see it as something “real” (for the lack of a better word). If it’s purpose was to differentiate between bots and humans, then it should be called something like “verification token” instead.

I understand your point though: spam has become such a pain for most of us that some of us now plainly mistrust what website operators might possibly do with our email addresses.

Have we gotten to the point where WP (and other blogging platforms) should be changed to NOT prompt for an email address any longer but instead prompt for something like a “verification token” instead? Personally, I don’t think so but I’m just wandering how many people are thinking the same thing.

I agree that it seems the op intent is to spam the e-mails he will get from his request because he is asking for all of the e-mails commented on the website, not just registered users.

If it was to registered users only, I’d side with Dgold – as it could be a newsletter of sorts (but the op should find a way to do the subscribe option first).

I’ve been wondering the same thing, pizdin_dim – but I’m not sure what such a token might encompass as opposed to using an email addy (yes, there is “captcha” – but I understand it’s far from being ‘bot unusable any more).

It’s just become painful to deal with all the spam…. I think that’s why this sort of post gets so much aggravated response.