MktAgent can generate tremendous website traffic almost overnight. When thousands of netizens become aware of a particular site, the word-of-mouth continues to bring visitors for a very long time. It is this initial "critical mass" that MktAgent was originally designed to attract.
But, MktAgent is also much more than that. By carefully planning your MktAgent "Ad Campaign", you can directly generate TARGETED marketing lists containing literally hundreds of thousands of potential customers. All on your Windows-95/NT system.
Given a starting URL (an HTTP address), MktAgent will search that site for any hyperlinks, and follow them, from there to anywhere. Along the way, it'll find Email addresses embedded within HTML pages. In effect, MktAgent crawls from site-to-site, locating and pushing people's "mail-ME" buttons.
MktAgent does NOT skim newsgroups, databases, and/or private subscriber lists. It locates addresses on published, accessible WWWeb-pages, and sends just a single message to each recipient. MktAgent will contact those people who have invited this comment by displaying their Email coordinates in a "please-mail-to-me" context (i.e. a MAILTO button on a public page).
Theory of Operation
As described above, MktAgent is designed to roam the World Wide Web looking for, contacting, and
remembering Email Addresses. It contains various sub-programs that perform specific tasks. A few of the
most important ones are described briefly here (and are covered in detail in subsequent
sections).
Basically, you envision a MktAgent "Ad Campaign", and based on this vision, prepare a message that you believe will draw people to your business. Then, you search the web for people who are interested in what you have to say. Having found them, you send each a single copy of your Electronic Advertisement. Continuing in this manner, you can easily locate and contact hundreds of thousands of potential clients.
MktCrawler is the HTTP-crawling thread, that scours the WWW for published Email Addresses. It will check every address found against MktAgent's ever-growing lists and report all previously unencountered addresses to MktAgent. Any new addresses will be placed on MktAgent's Pending List.
MktMailer is the SMTP-mailing thread, which sends a message to each address found by MktCrawler. It obtains its addresses from MktAgent's Pending list, and will save all "sent" addresses in MktAgent's Sent list and in MktAgent's Email Address DataBase.
MktMailDB is similar to MktMailer in that it is another SMTP-mailing thread. But, MktMailDB is capable of remailing all addresses that are stored in MktAgent's DataBase.
MktSetup - Configuration Dialog
The MktSetup dialog box allows you to configure MktAgent. You can select this option
from MktAgent's main menu at any time. MktSetup allows you to specify which sites/addresses
are excluded from being searched by MktCrawler, and it lets you
define the message headers and body that will be sent by MktMailer
and/or MktMailDB.
Exclusion Lists Setup
Excluded Sites is a list of domain names that MktCrawler will NOT add to its search list. It is impossible to crawl over anything in this list. Some large sites (such as search engines) do not have many MAILTO buttons and are better ignored. Other sites have 1000's of such buttons, and will get aggravated the first time MktCrawler visits them. No problem, just drop their domain name into the Excluded Sites list. After all, everybody in that site has already received the message.
Excluded Names is a list of stock names, things like WEBMASTER or SYSOP. Usually, whoever made the pages at a given site has some catch-all name on many pages, but their personal address will appear inside somewhere. Skipping these ADMIN-type names helps to avoid any duplication which can occur from sending to SUSAN@host.com and to WEBMISTRESS@host.com. This exclusion list is also a good way to avoid mail lists. Often list server names are identifiable (like MajorDomo, ListServ, or containing -list or somesuch). If a mailing list gets hit, you'll hear about, so just put its name on the Excluded Names list.
Excluded Addresses is the most specific of all. It lists individuals whose addresses should be ignored. This includes complainers, discussion lists, basically anyone whose feedback indicates that they don't want to hear about it. Sometimes lists slip in, when they've been given a non-list looking name (e.g. BAPA - Bay Area Pinball Association, real big complainers).
MktLists - RunTime List Manager
MktLists allows you to manipulate the contents of MktAgent's Pending and/or Sent list.
Access to this execution thread is via the MktLists menu. It has the following 3 selections:
MktAgentDB - Address DataBase Manager
MktAgentDB allows you to examine and manipulate the contents of MktAgent's DataBase. This database is optimized
to contain Email Addresses, which can have one of the following three states:
MktAgent's database can be manipulated via the MktAgentDB menu, which has the following 13 selections:
MktFilter - Pattern Matching DB Filter
Launching MktFilter
Once MktFilter has been invoked (via its selection from the MktAgentDB menu), there are two values which must be entered, to define what pattern will influence the selection of Email addresses:
Once the filter pattern has been chosen, MktFilter's database filtering operations can be initiated by using one of the five (5) buttons:
MktCrawler - MultiThreaded HTTP Crawler
Launching MktCrawlers
Probably the main work component of MktAgent is its webwalking spider called MktCrawler. This is a traditional "web-crawler", in that it is given a webpage to start from, and it examines this page for links to other pages/sites and follows them. To launch a MktCrawler, just enter an HTTP-type URL (Universal Resource Locator, something like http://www.xyzzy.web) into the Starting URL field at the top of the MktAgent window; then, press the launch MktCrawler button just below it. This will start one MktCrawler directed towards whatever website that URL points to.
You'll see a MktCrawler box appear, and links to other sites and other pages within the same site will begin appearing in its two list boxes. The upper box lists site names, the lower box lists specific pages within those sites. MktCrawler will proceed to search pages within a site in a First-seen, first-searched basis, and will continue examining pages until it has picked up Search Depth pages. Obviously, you can control how deep into a site MktCrawler will go, by changing this value before launching MktCrawler.
Search Depth is an important parameter. By setting it quite low (less than 10), you're basically conducting a "breadth-wise" search. That is, you're looking at the front few pages of each site. This is great for scanning over large lists of links or lots of so-called vanity domains.
On the other hand, you can set this quite high (or put it on ZERO to cause MktCrawler to examine every page in every site). This type of crawling is referred to as "depth-wise" crawling. Deep inspection of sites can be very useful when a MktCrawler is started from a list of all user pages at a large domain. Most Internet Service Providers (ISPs) publish exactly such a page, with links to everyone of their clients' sites. Full deep searching of such a list will often yield the Email address of every published account on their system.
Lastly, there's the Pause and Abort buttons on each MktCrawler, which do exactly what you'd expect. Pause asks MktCrawler to suspend searching as soon as it finishes the current page. Press it again and searching will resume. Abort will cause MktCrawler to exit, but only after it makes sure that's what you really want.
Controlling individual MktCrawlers
Overall, MktCrawler is fairly simple to use; and, while it can run unattended, it is much more efficient, if its human operator helps out. While crawling (and possibly mailing), the user can hit the Slide and Float buttons to help MktCrawler to skip over files or entire sites that are not of interest. Slide skips only the currently inspected file. Float is more drastic, and abandons the entire site.
It can be quite interesting and instructive to "drive" the MktCrawler in this way. The driver will quickly notice where to find "link farms", guest books, or contact lists, trends in what links to what, sites to exclude for various reasons, stock names to avoid, difficult spaces, "black holes", all manner of hitherto unknown aspects of the WWW virtual terrain.
Controlling ALL MktCrawlers
You can use the selections on the MktCrawler menu, to Pause and/or Abort all currently executing MktCrawler threads. The Pause selection will toggle the "pause" state; that is, the first click will pause everybody, the next will restart them. Note also that neither Pause nor Abort take effect immediately. Both selections pass a request to all threads to perform the operation as soon as it becomes possible to do so (i.e. as soon as the currently waiting connection is complete).
What happens when MktCrawler finds an Email Address
Whenever MktCrawler locates an address, lots of things happen. First of all, that address is placed in a queue to be inspected by MktAgent. When it gets a chance, MktAgent will check that address against the Excluded Names and the Excluded Addresses lists. If it's not on those lists, then that address is searched for in the DataBase. If it's not there either, then it's considered a new address and placed on the Pending list, and entered into the MktAgentDB as a Pending mailbox.
If you don't plan to use MktMailer to send to these addresses right now, that's OK. They will be in the Pending section of the MktAgentDB for mailing later by using MktMailDB (see below).
Using MktCrawler with your favourite Search Engine
To improve the effectiveness of your MktAgent Ad Campaign, you can use any public search engine to help locate sites that are within your target audience. Just run whatever web browser you like and visit whatever search tool you prefer (no recommendations from us on either of these thorny issues). Refine and revise your search until you're viewing a search engine link page that has lots of links that look good. Copy the long, squiggly, CGI-type URL for that page from your browser's URL field. Then paste that URL in to MktAgent's Starting URL field and start a MktCrawler. It'll search all those sites for you, and the ones they link to, and on and on.
Remember to set the Search Depth field to a value large enough to accomodate how ever many links your search engine will return. HotBot and Excite, for example, can return 100 links per page, and will return a maximum of 1000 links for a given search term. You can start 10 MktCrawlers towards each of those 10 lists of 100 links and build a LARGE, TARGETTED list quickly.
The default .INI file, that MktAgent is shipped with, is setup to exclude crawling over all the "side-sites" that hang off of both HotBot and Lycos. These two search engines allow one to fetch large pages of links (50 - 100 pages long), and will return ten pages for each search. By excluding the "side-sides", MktAgent does not get bogged down trying to get pages from the bells & whistles (e.g. stocks.hotbot.com or personal.lycos.com); but rather, proceeeds immediately to the real work of searching the list you've located.
MktMailer - MultiThreaded SMTP Mailer
Launching MktMailers
Once MktCrawler has located new addresses and placed them in MktAgent's Pending list, it's time to startup a MktMailer or two. Assuming that you've used MktSetup to configure the message and its envelope, just enter the name of your SMTP server into the SMTP Port field in MktAgent's window and press the launch MktMailer button right next to it.
You'll see MktMailer box appear, and addresses will begin to disappear from MktAgent's Pending list and reappear on its Sent list. Those addresses have received your Electronic Advertisement.
The Batch Size field controls how many messages MktMailer will send in each connection to the SMTP daemon. Setting this to a high number (like 100) will result in somewhat better performance, since MktMailer won't have to wait as often to establish a connection. For unstable or slow mail servers, or when using the Anonymize feature (see the MktSetup section for more info on anonymizing your message), you should set this value very low, even as low as one (1).
The BCC Count field controls how many (if any) recipients will be included in a Blind Carbon Copy list. If this field's value is ZERO (the default), then no BCC list will be created. That is, for each recipient address, an individual message will be constructed and sent.
On the other hand, setting BCC Count to value greater than ZERO instructs MktMailer to combine that many recipients into a Blind CC-List and send a bulk message. This message will be addressed "To" and "From" whatever return address you have configured, and all of the actual recipients will appear in the BCC-List (this insures that no copied recipient will be aware of any of the others).
There are advantages and disadvantages to each approach. Individual Emails have a tendency to be more deliverable, for the simple fact that many mail servers have filters that will delete copy-listed mailings. Individual mailings are significantly slower however, since a new message must be constructed for each recipient.
By contrast, BCC mailings will run much faster. If you use a BCC Count of 50 (maximum is 100), you can expect to send about 30-40 times more messages than an individual mailing would have. Additionally, you would receive one message out of every 50 to your return address, so you can know for sure that your Electronic Advertisement is being sent. This can be quite important, since so many of today's SMTPs and POPs apply fatal filtering (i.e. they delete, bounce, or otherwise fail to deliver messages that meet certain criteria; that is, they are censoring your Email).
Agressive logging, monitoring, and filtering of Email can be such a problem for Electronic Advertisers, that MktAgent includes the MktScanner for finding and testing SMTP server daemons.
Lastly, you can monitor MktMailer's progress by checking the Sent Count and the Fail Count, which reflect exactly the totals that their names describe.
Controlling individual MktMailers
MktMailer has two buttons that function exactly like MktCrawler's. They are Pause and Abort, and again do exactly what you'd expect. Pause asks MktMailer to suspend sending as soon as it finishes the current message. Press it again and mailing will resume. Abort will cause MktMailer to exit, but only after it makes sure that's what you really want.
Controlling ALL MktMailers
You can use the selections on the MktMailer menu, to Pause and/or Abort all currently executing MktMailer threads.
The Pause selection will toggle the "pause" state; that is, the first click will pause everybody, the next will restart them. Note also that neither Pause nor Abort take effect immediately. Both selections pass a request to all threads to perform the operation as soon as it becomes possible to do so (i.e. as soon as the currently waiting connection is complete).
Sending a Test Message
You can send a test message, by using the selection on the MktMailer menu. Choosing this menu item will cause the message you have configured in the MktSetup window to be sent out through the SMTP server named in the MktAgent window. This allows you to verify that the mailer daemon you have chosen will safely relay your message, and that the envelope will appear exactly as you want it. For more information on locating usable Email servers, see the discussion of MktScanner below.
NOTE: It's a good idea to send a test Email prior to every mailing session.
MktMailDB - Address DataBase ReMailer
Launching MktMailDBs
The startup process is the same for MktMailDB as for MktMailer. The only difference between these two close-relatives is the source of the addresses that will be sent to. In this case, each MktMailDB thread will compete to find Pending addresses in the DataBase. As they are sent to, they are marked as Sent. Once the entire DataBase has been sent to, all MktMailDBs will exit.
You can start as many MktMailDB threads as your system can handle. The number varies greatly, depending on your processor speed, your memory size, the speed of your Internet connection, and the speed of the SMTP server that you pointed the MktMailDB to.
Controlling individual MktMailDBs
Just like it's cousin MktMailer, MktMailDB has Pause and Abort buttons, and they work exactly the same.
Controlling ALL MktMailDBs
You can use the "Pause MktMailDB(s)" and "Abort MktMailDB(s)" selections on the MktMailer menu, to Pause and/or Abort all currently executing MktMailDB threads.
MktScanner - useful SMTP locator/tester
MktScanner is a feature unique to MktAgent, and is invoked via its selection from
the MktMailer menu. To run, it requires that you supply a Return Address in the MktSetup
window, which it will use as the destination address for its test messages.
Once started, it will run through the MktAgentDB, extracting the hostnames from the Email addresses that're saved therein. MktScanner will attempt to connect to every unique mail server named in the MktAgentDB. If successfull, it will perform a series of tests to determine how this mailer daemon constructs Email headers. The various servers might fall into one of six (6) possible categories:
But, that message might not arrive at all, because some systems run ChuckMail (the server that delivers all messages to the bit-bucket, cute huh?). Or, the test might arrive, only to discover that on close inspection of the RECEIVED headers, the originator's IP address was logged.
MktScanner can be instrumental in locating a useful SMTP server for sending your message. Do remember though, that you *must* examine the test Emails very carefully, to determine the exact contents of the actual RECEIVED headers.
Controlling MktScanner
MktScanner has three (3) buttons that're pretty self-explanatory. They are Pause, Abort, and Write, and they do exactly what you'd expect:
Installation Notes
MktAgent support libraries
First time installations will require the Run Time Libraries to be loaded. If you've upgrading to a newer version of MktAgent, you can skip to the next section; otherwise, you should have downloaded the MktAgentRTL.exe self-extracting archive. When executed, that archive will install the following ten (10) runtime support files into your \Windows\System directory:
MktAgent program and documentation
The MktAgent128.exe self-extracting archive, when executed, will install the following four (4) files into your \MktAgent directory:
MktAgent is relatively self-contained.
The first time MktAgent is executed on a particular system, it will take a few minutes to build and initialize its database, the MktAgentDB. Take a look at the green status line at the bottom of the main window. It'll show the progress of this initialization. Once it says "MarketCom's MktAgent is ready!", you can begin webcrawling, listbuilding, and emailing.
Good Luck! God Bless! Do Business!
This is the information file for MarketCom's MktAgent, which was designed, implemented, and is solely owned MarketCom, Houston, Texas
World rights reserved (c) 1997-1999. Use by permission only.