Some email names attract more spam: researcher

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 03 September 2008 09:09

Business IT - Networking

A researcher at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory asked the question "Do Zebras get more Spam than Aardvarks?" The answer may surprise you.

Richard Clayton wondered whether the first letter of an email address - typically the first letter of a person's name or username - makes any difference to the amount of spam received.

The hypothesis was tested by examining email arriving at UK ISP Demon Internet and passed to the Cloudmark spam detection system. Emails were excluded by Demon's systems (and therefore did not figure in the study) if they originated from systems on the SpamHaus Policy Block List and from those on the SpamHaus ZEN list that did not retry transmission after originally being deferred.

Data was collected from over 550 million emails received during an eight-week period in February and March this year.

56 percent of these emails were determined to be spam. That in itself was a pretty good result when you consider that some organisations in the antispam industry suggest more than 80 percent of all emails traversing the Internet are spam.

The next step was to separate 'real' email addresses - defined empirically as those that receive on average at least one non-spam email every other day - from the rest.

So what was the outcome? See page two.