[R] UNSOLITED E_MAILS: Integrate R data-analysis projects wi

[(Ted Harding)]

On 18-Mar-08 12:08:44, Gorden T Jemwa wrote:
> Dear R Admins,
> 
> I received an unsolicited e-mail from BlueInference as an R 
> user. Does it mean that R that our e-mails (and  names) is 
> sharing it's user database with third parties without our 
> consent? Or perhaps the BlueInference guys are using an 
> e-mail address miner to get our contact details?
> [SNIP]
> Dear Gorden Jemwa,
> 
> As a fellow R user, I am sure you agree with me that R is a 
> dear gift from the R-project community that should enjoy 
> broad use.
> [...]
> Ben Hinchliffe
> Inference Evangelist
> BlueReference, Inc.
> ben.hinchliffe at bluereference.com

It would not be difficult to mine a database of email addresses
from the R-help archives. Each month's postings can be downloaded
as a .gz file. Each posting in the resulting unzipped .txt file
has a line of the form

  From: user.name at email.domain

and all that's then needed is to replace " at " with "@", and
you have the email address.

On a Unix system, a quick 'grep | sed' would do the job
in a second!

In this case, the spam was clearly carefully targeted at R users,
so quite possibly they took a bit more trouble over it (to the
point of extracting full names as well).

I can't see the R people deliberately sharing their database,
and the list of subscribed email addresses is accessible only
to the list owners. So it seems much more likely that the
publicly readable archives have been mined along the lines
I suggest above.

Best wishes,
Ted.

--------------------------------------------------------------------
E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding at manchester.ac.uk>
Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861
Date: 18-Mar-08                                       Time: 12:32:30
------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------