Some email names attract more spam: researcher

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 03 September 2008 08:09

Business IT - Networking

"[A]n individual 'real zebra', on average, will find that less than 20% of their email is spam, whereas a particular 'real aardvark, on average, will detect that over 30% of their email is spam."

Other common initial letters attracting higher levels of spam include c, d, j, m and s, while addresses beginning with q, x and y received relatively small amounts of spam.

It's tempting to suggest that names falling early in the alphabet get more spam because spammers start at the beginning of alphabetised lists and work progressively through them. Assuming that such campaigns stop when the contracted number of messages are sent, that would make sense.

But Clayton found little evidence of this, as runs in alphabetical order accounted for less than three percent of the spam detected. His previous research indicates alphabetical lists are commonly used by spammers, so he suggests the SpamHaus lists employed by Demon are already blocking much of that activity.

"[T]here is limited evidence of incoming email being alphabetically sorted by recipient – suggesting that these attacks are not especially common at the present time", he concluded.

But if you are concerned about the amount of spam reaching your inbox, it seems it's better to be a 'zebra' than an 'aardvark'.