[time-nuts] 2 (Spoofing)

[Jim Lux]

On 10/5/11 5:30 AM, Raj wrote:
> Some subscribe to lists of interest and harvest email IDs. A decade ago I collected all the digests from another similar type of group and harvested the emails and then made an analysis as to who posted more on the group. The stats were interesting! not for spamming!
>
> Raj
>
>> Speaking of spam...
>>
>> I'm curious where they got my address from.
>>

Exactly.. this kind of targeted marketing is not the massive 
indiscriminate spam.

If you were selling, say, supercomputers or services for supercomputers, 
it might be worth it to gather up the last 10 years of Beowulf list 
archives and write whatever scripts are needed to extract the emails 
(i.e. many list archives obscure the email in some 
way:myname<at>mydomain, so that the archives aren't trivially scrapable)

Look for the top posters, and send them an email.

On most lists, less than 5-10% of the list recipients actually post in 
any given year, so you'd pick up only a few hundred emails (might be 
better to call them "sales leads" at this point).

Since there's a whole lot of "touch labor" in this process, I suspect 
the targeted email might be better formatted and less obnoxious.

After all, I get an email every day or so from various and sundry trade 
rags (EDN, EETimes, etc.) that I subscribe to in paper form, mostly full 
of advertising, although often with links to articles of interns.  I 
don't know that I explicitly asked to receive it, and, in general, 
they'll let you opt out, although with the interlocking nature of 
publishers, if you dump one publication's emails, sometimes you'll still 
get them because you subscribe to another one from the same pub.


And, this is, after all, *sales*... always be closing.