In Economics, there is a concept of 'leading' and 'lagging' indicators. 'Leading' indicators predict economic activity in the future- they are statistics which give a decent idea how things will be soon. 'Lagging' indicators are the opposite; they signal performance in the recent past. Is it possible that there is a leading indicator of the economy that we all experience? According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, our spam email messages have become more bullish over the past few months.
Spam Email... and Eggs
Has Your Spam Email Ever Been Peppy? (Jeremy Noble)
The security company Symantec publishes a monthly document on the trends in the computer security world known as "Trends in Spam and Phishing" (Spam is, of course, unwanted email messages or other contact. Phishing is attempting to con people into giving up personal information such as social security numbers and passwords). Symantec has noted an improvement in the economic messages in spam email, and especially notes the improved prospects implied by the subjects of the top 10 emails.
Get the Job fast this one!
Hopefully that heading title doesn't get this article flagged as spam!
The top ten email subjects in the economic domain certainly do seem peppy - they deal with jobs and job references. Contrast this with October 2007, when Symantec notes "Spammers feed off housing crisis". Or, compare it to January 2009 when "Spammers use the recession to enter your inbox". However, spammers have become more optimistic, and are more likely to target you with fake job offers and diploma mill sites than gold scams and mortgage foreclosure information.
Of course, the overall theme is vetted by a security researcher (as noted by Dermot Harnett, a Symantec Engineer, in the WSJ article). Also, those of you that use gmail probably have seen very few spam messages get through Google's strong filters. Still... is this a reason to be optimistic? Can spammers really predict an improving outlook?
What do you think? Are you getting more spam email with the better economy?
