The email above doesn’t seem like anything special. In fact, it is only one inconsequential email in a sample set of over half a million sent between 1997 and 2004 to, from, and within one company, the Enron Corporation.
The fallout was immense, and rapid, with Enron filing for bankruptcy in 2001, Arthur Andersen being dissolved , and the subsequent collapse of WorldCom in 2002 due to an even larger accounting scandal, again with Arthur Andersen as their auditors.In fact, a number of faulty audits of other companies also came to light.
For transparency, historical, and academic research purposes the FERC made the dataset public and posted it to the internet. Then there’s the spam. While the structure of the dataset makes it hard to analyse, sampling at different points in time is an effective way to see spam volumes increasing and the development of phishing. Which, for those trying to develop anti-spam tools or phishing filters, was incredibly valuable. These are genuine emails from an organisation, not a simple set of dummy data, and so if a filter can work effectively on the Enron dataset it’s likely to be effective elsewhere.