How I Scraped Nearly 2,000 Bellingham School District Staff Emails

Jamisen Renoud

May 11th, 2025

Note: This is a completely public endpoint. No login or security was bypassed.

I was snooping around the Bellingham Public School's Website and went to the contact page.

When I looked in the network tab on dev tools, I saw every time you scrolled for more results on the page, It would send a request to https://bellinghamschools.org/wp-content/themes/schoolsites/directoryHandler.php?numPosts=9&pageNumber=1, and every time increased the page number by 1.

This got me thinking, upon going to https://bellinghamschools.org/wp-content/themes/schoolsites/directoryHandler.php?numPosts=9&pageNumber=1, you are greeted by a no css page, that just has photos and info, and it has the persons photo, name, phone number, and other stuff.

At the end of all that is a mailto herf with their email. So I created a simple Python script, the first issue was that I was manually taking every page 1 by 1 up to 193 pages (I would get rate limited in like a sec) so I just used ?numPosts=9999999999&pageNumber=1 and got everything at once.

I ended up with this code

import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

URL = "https://bellinghamschools.org/wp-content/themes/schoolsites/directoryHandler.php?numPosts=9999999999&pageNumber=1"
HEADERS = {
    "User-Agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/117.0"
}

try:
    r = requests.get(URL, headers=HEADERS, timeout=15)
    r.raise_for_status()

    soup = BeautifulSoup(r.text, "html.parser")
    emails = {
        a["href"].replace("mailto:", "").strip()
        for a in soup.find_all("a", href=True)
        if a["href"].startswith("mailto:")
    }

    with open("emails.txt", "w") as f:
        for email in sorted(emails):
            f.write(email + "\n")

    print(f"[Yippe] Done. {len(emails)} emails saved to emails.txt.")
except Exception as e:
    print(f"[!] Failed: {e}")
    

It just sends 1 request, and gets all the emails!! It makes a file with 1 email per line, when I ran it today I got 1732 emails!
[Yippe] Done. 1732 emails saved to emails.txt.

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