Immersion Reveals How People are Connected via Email by Andrew Vande Moere.
From the post:
Immersion [mit.edu] is a quite revealing visualization tool of which the NSA – or your own national security agency – can only be jealous of… Developed by MIT students Daniel Smilkov, Deepak Jagdish and César Hidalgo, Immersion generates a time-varying network visualization of all your email contacts, based on how you historically communicated with them.
Immersion is able to aggregate and analyze the “From”, “To”, “Cc” and “Timestamp” data of all the messages in any (authorized) Gmail, MS Exchange or Yahoo email account. It then filters out the ‘collaborators’ – people from whom one has received, and sent, at least 3 email messages from, and to.
Remember what I said about IT making people equal?
Access someone’s email account, which are often hacked, and you can have a good idea of their social network.
Or I assume you can run it across mailing list archives with a diluted result for any particular person.