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. > [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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) <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 18-Mar-08 Time: 12:32:30 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------ ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
