R help - Mar 2008 - UNSOLITED E_MAILS: Integrate R data-analysis projects with Microsoft Office for free

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.  Towards that end, we?ve built a software 
solution directed at the very large community of Microsoft 
Office users, called Inference for Office.  It combines the 
powerful data-analysis capabilities of R with the familiar 
and flexible word-processing and data-preparation features 
of Microsoft Word and Excel.  We are making Inference for 
Office available for free to R users at educational and 
non-profit research institutions.  A free trial is available 
for everyone.

With Inference for Office, you can assemble all the elements 
of an R data-analysis project (text, data, R objects, R 
code) into dynamic documents.  These dynamic documents can 
then be executed in real-time to create results documents 
containing all the output and graphics.  If Inference for 
Office is of no interest to you, please disregard this 
message and accept our humble apologies for having bothered you.

If Inference for Office sounds like it might useful, you can 
obtain additional information by visiting our website and 
viewing a two-minute screencast overview of Inference for 
Office:

http://www.inference.us

While you're there, you can also download a free trial of 
Inference for Office

To your success,

  --Ben

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 
. . . . .
Ben Hinchliffe
Inference Evangelist
BlueReference, Inc.
ben.hinchliffe at bluereference.com
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 
. . . . .
website:  www.inference.us

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 ------------------------------

Me too. Getting directly spammed like this is really annoying. I dont mind a
general post to the list, but individually spamming each member of the list
is unacceptable. Especially as I have no interest in the stupid product in
question.



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.  Towards that end, we?ve built a software 
> solution directed at the very large community of Microsoft 
> Office users, called Inference for Office.  It combines the 
> powerful data-analysis capabilities of R with the familiar 
> and flexible word-processing and data-preparation features 
> of Microsoft Word and Excel.  We are making Inference for 
> Office available for free to R users at educational and 
> non-profit research institutions.  A free trial is available 
> for everyone.
> 
> With Inference for Office, you can assemble all the elements 
> of an R data-analysis project (text, data, R objects, R 
> code) into dynamic documents.  These dynamic documents can 
> then be executed in real-time to create results documents 
> containing all the output and graphics.  If Inference for 
> Office is of no interest to you, please disregard this 
> message and accept our humble apologies for having bothered you.
> 
> If Inference for Office sounds like it might useful, you can 
> obtain additional information by visiting our website and 
> viewing a two-minute screencast overview of Inference for 
> Office:
> 
> http://www.inference.us
> 
> While you're there, you can also download a free trial of 
> Inference for Office
> 
> To your success,
> 
>   --Ben
> 
> . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 
> . . . . .
> Ben Hinchliffe
> Inference Evangelist
> BlueReference, Inc.
> ben.hinchliffe at bluereference.com
> . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 
> . . . . .
> website:  www.inference.us
> 
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at 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.
> 
> 
-- 
View this message in context:
http://www.nabble.com/UNSOLITED-E_MAILS%3A-Integrate-R-data-analysis-projects-with-Microsoft-Office-for-free-tp16119878p16142681.html
Sent from the R help mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

The guys didn't need to work very hard to obtain our data. (My understanding
is that) all the mails from this list are publicly available at the R-help
archives. You will find yourself here:

http://tolstoy.newcastle.edu.au/R/e4/help/08/03/index.html

That is why we can (and must) browse through the history of the mail-list to
avoid asking again an already-answered question. The bad side is that our
name and email address are exposed.

just in case: I have nothing to do with the spammers





On Tue, Mar 18, 2008 at 9:08 PM, Gorden T Jemwa <jemwa@sun.ac.za> 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.  Towards that end, we've built a software
> solution directed at the very large community of Microsoft
> Office users, called Inference for Office.  It combines the
> powerful data-analysis capabilities of R with the familiar
> and flexible word-processing and data-preparation features
> of Microsoft Word and Excel.  We are making Inference for
> Office available for free to R users at educational and
> non-profit research institutions.  A free trial is available
> for everyone.
>
> With Inference for Office, you can assemble all the elements
> of an R data-analysis project (text, data, R objects, R
> code) into dynamic documents.  These dynamic documents can
> then be executed in real-time to create results documents
> containing all the output and graphics.  If Inference for
> Office is of no interest to you, please disregard this
> message and accept our humble apologies for having bothered you.
>
> If Inference for Office sounds like it might useful, you can
> obtain additional information by visiting our website and
> viewing a two-minute screencast overview of Inference for
> Office:
>
> http://www.inference.us
>
> While you're there, you can also download a free trial of
> Inference for Office
>
> To your success,
>
>  --Ben
>
> . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
> . . . . .
> Ben Hinchliffe
> Inference Evangelist
> BlueReference, Inc.
> ben.hinchliffe@bluereference.com
> . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
> . . . . .
> website:  www.inference.us
>
> ______________________________________________
> 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.
>


-- 
ahimsa campos-arceiz
PhD candidate
Lab of Biodiversity Science
The University of Tokyo
www.camposarceiz.com

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