Toolbox: New Products for IT Professionals
This month’s tools let you mine files and folders for e-mail addresses, perform bulk file-renaming tasks, and test your attack surface and port exposure online.
Greg Steen
Easy Email Extractor
Have you ever needed to parse the bad mail directory on your SMTP service or look through an old archive of e-mail files? Having a quick way to extract e-mail addresses from a file, folder or chunk of text can be quite handy. The Easy Email Extractor, from NoVirusThanks Co. Srl., is one simple, free tool that can help with that.
Easy Email Extractor works with just about any flavor of Windows in both 32- and 64-bit editions. The tabbed interface is split into File, Folder, String, URL, Settings and Filters. The File option extracts e-mails from a file. Similarly, the Folder option scans files within a folder for e-mail addresses. Using the String tab, you can paste a chunk of text from your clipboard and the application will parse out any addresses. The URL tab lets you paste a URL to do the same. The Settings tab gives you an option to add Easy Email Extractor to the SendTo context menu within Windows Explorer.
All scans run based on your Filters settings. A filter is a regex or word the program looks for to ignore (exclude) that type of address from the results. This is useful for excluding addresses from your domain or known spam domains. After any scan, you can export the e-mail addresses to a file or copy them to the clipboard. There are no frills to this simple tool, but it’s quite useful, easy-to-use and—best of all— it’s free.
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Bulk Rename Utility
Have you ever had to write a script to rename a bunch of log files or directories? Ever needed to put the date into a file name based on the create date for archival purposes? One tool out there to help you rename files en masse is the free Bulk Rename Utility from TGRMN Software.
You can use Bulk Rename Utility to rename thousands of files across directories in short order. There’s an Explorer-like interface with which you can browse to your target directories or files you wish to rename. Overall, the UI is a little occluded, but once you get the hang of it, it’s easy to use.
Once you’ve established your renaming rules, the detail pane gives you a preview of the new name once the action is applied. You’ll also see details like the file size and type; file attributes like create, modified and last-accessed dates; and file length in bytes. The bottom portion of the UI is dedicated to the various renaming options you have at your disposal. There are 13 different rules you can apply in order to create a sophisticated matching and renaming plan in one shot.
You can use regular expressions to match and replace file names. You can trim file names to a specific length, and replace or reverse the name. You can replace or remove text within a file name. You can change the casing of a file name’s upper, lower, title or sentence case. You can also remove characters by position or type (such as remove all digits or remove the first four characters).
Additionally, you can add a prefix or suffix to a file name, or even insert a string. For file attributes, you can tweak creation, modification or access times, or append a date to the filename itself. You can also number files as you rename them starting at any number and incrementing as you wish. You can even use Roman numerals or change to another number base such as base 16 to rename the files.
There’s also an option to append the folder name to the file name. You can append a file extension to every matched file as well. Finally, the last two options help you match selections based on a file or type of item (folder or file, file name length and so on). You can copy or move matched files after you’ve renamed them to another location. You can set all these options at once, and they’re applied in a specific order so you can have a definitive outcome.
Once you’re all set up, you click the Rename button and off it goes. If you make a mistake, click Revert to restore files to their original states. There are other options that help you both visualize renamed files and ensure you perform the actions you intended. There’s a log file of every change made, so you can know exactly what happened and when.
Bulk Rename Utility is available in both native 32- and 64-bit editions, as well as an installer-free download so you can bring it around with your other tools. There’s also a command-line version of Bulk Rename Utility, which is great for scripting and automating everyday renaming tasks.
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ShieldsUP!
It’s essential to know your systems’ surface area of exposure to the Internet. One free service out there can help you determine the ports and services open to the world: ShieldsUP!, from Gibson Research Corp. Point your browser to the ShieldsUP! Web site and pick the test you want to perform. ShieldsUP! services include a file-sharing test, a common-ports scan, an all-service-ports scan, a User Datagram Protocol (UDP) Messenger Service spam test, custom-port probing and a browser-header test (because you’re requesting the service with a browser).
The file-sharing test connects to your machine via NetBIOS ports 137-139 to see if sharing is enabled. The common-ports test scans for open services such as FTP, SSH, SMTP, HTTP, IMAP and so on. This tells you if it could make a connection or if there was a response on connection to an open service. The all-service-ports scan does a similar type of probe, but across the first 1,056 ports. This shows you where a port is open or closed, or if the port is hidden.
The Windows Messenger Service spam test probes the old vulnerability where four small UDP packets sent to port 135 on your machine cause a dialog to pop up with spam messages on your machine. The browser-header test shows you all headers sent from your machine or server Internet browser along with each HTTP request. You’ll see how much information you’re spreading as you surf the Internet. The custom port probe test lets you specify various ranges of ports to probe, again telling you whether each port is open, closed or hidden.
ShieldsUP! also has the “Port Authority Database.” This shows you the type of service that would use each port, along with useful background and vulnerability information. The next time you bring a system online, try the ShieldsUP! service to assess your port exposure and ensure you aren’t leaking information.
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Greg Steen is a technology professional, entrepreneur and enthusiast. He’s always on the hunt for new tools to help make operations, QA and development easier for the IT professional.