Death By Email Blog

Warning To Twitter Users -- Don't Say "Email Me At.."

Disturbing blog entries at WebProNews and ZDnet claim that Spammers harvesting emails from Twitter - in real time. Basically, spammers are getting new, valid email addresses simply by searching Twitter feeds for common phrases like “email me at” and “contact me at” in a combination with a domain of a spammer’s choice.

The image on the left is from WebProNews It shows exactly how the search works and an example of the result.  (Click on it to expand.)  It would seem to be a simple matter to write a script that would extract valid email addresses.

Be careful what you tweet.

Harvard Economist Blames Twitter For Current Recession

Harvard Business School Professor Martin Schmeldon released results of research findings that suggest that excessive Twitter use may have caused the current economic downturn, according to a blog posting today.

"We see the rapid rise of Twitter usage in 2008 correlating very strongly with a tremendous decrease in American productivity," said Schmeldon. "Our regression analysis on the data suggests a causal relationship that may actually be larger than the impact of the much-touted subprime collateral debt refinancing triggers."

Employees who might otherwise be working productively and contributing to the economy can instead create Tweets, such as "I just realized I clipped all of my nails today except for one" or "My co-worker is drinking pepsi . Pepsi!!! I want some. Stupid Lent," reports the blog posting.

The posting goes on to say ....

Beltway insider and renowned economic advisor, West Tirrettia, believes Schmeldon's study could have some implications for economic policy that comes out of the current legislative session. "Congress has duly taken note of this research," said Tirrettia. "We may see some Twitter moratoriums coming in future stimulus bills. It's really just a question of whether lawmakers are willing to put their necks out against something that has become very popular back home in their constituencies."

The statistical validity of Schmeldon's research has been questioned by many statisticians and economists, including Pat Sooshisif, an associate professor of public policy at the Yale School of Management. "I think an informed reader of this research paper should be able to determine that Schmeldon wasn't engaging in serious statistical analysis of this data," wrote Sooshisif in the March 2009 issue of The Journal of Economic Perspective and Analysis. "Schmeldon cites a dual inflection point in December 2008. The stochastic confidence interval for that assertion is very low, and it is our conclusion that the z-factor is not statistically significant." Professor Schmeldon did not return repeated calls seeking comment on this research.

Clearly, we have proven the value of economic analysis and statistics.  :-)    (Tip of the hat to Sandy Bendorf.  Thanks for pointing it out.)

Need Cash In A Downturn? Try Spamming.

No -- don't do it.  People hate spammers.  But, you can now rest easy knowing that scientists from two top universities have shown what you already know -- spamming can be profitable.  I do not know what the study cost or if they took money from the government.  Yet, we have a conclusion.  The analysis suggests that even with a tiny response rate, a big spam operation can turn over millions of dollars in profits every year.

Scientists from University of California, Berkeley and UC, San Diego (UCSD) determined that even with an incredibly small response rate -- spamming can be quite profitable.  As if you didn't guess that.  What you may not know is that it is profitable if you get just one click for every 12.5-million emails.

How did they measure it?  Over seven months, the researchers sent 469-million email messages using a zombie network of 75,869 hijacked home computers as relays for junk mail.  (BBC)

"The best way to measure spam is to be a spammer," wrote the researchers in a paper describing their work.

Two types of fake spam campaign were run through these machines. One mimicked the way viruses spread and the other tried to tempt people to visit a fake pharmacy site and buy a herbal remedy to boost their libido.  (The fake pharmacy site always returned an error message when potential buyers clicked a button to submit their credit card details.)

"After 26 days, and almost 350 million e-mail messages, only 28 sales resulted," wrote the researchers.  The response rate for this campaign was less than 0.00001%. This is far below the average of 2.15% reported by legitimate direct mail organizations.

"Taken together, these conversions would have resulted in revenues of $2,731.88—a bit over $100 a day for the measurement period," said the researchers.

Scaling this up a full-sized zombie network, the researchers estimate that the controllers of the vast system are netting about $7,000 a day or more than $2-million per year.