The first letter of your email address plays a big part in how much spam you receive, according to a British researcher. So why do messages going to email addresses beginning with “A” contain spam 30 per cent of the time?
Digital Journal — If your email address begins with a letter in the top half of the alphabet, you might be getting more spam than those with addresses starting with “L” and beyond. According to Richard Clayton of the University of Cambridge, spammers flood email addresses more often when those addresses begin with “A”. He found those addresses received 35 per cent spam.
But email addresses beginning with “Z” get a smaller proportion of spam — around 20 per cent.
Why is this so? Clayton explains in his paper:
The most likely reason for these results is the prevalence of “dictionary” or “Rumpelstiltskin” attacks (where spammers guess addresses). If there are not many other zebras, then guessing zebra names is less likely.
Essentially, spammers can guess those “a” addresses more often than with “z” addresses. But Clayton also found a few anomalies: some addresses received more spam than the “a” ones. Those beginning with R, P, S and M all received around 40 per cent spam.
Clayton suggests customers with the unfortunate letters in their addresses should ask “their favourite email filter designer to think about how this unexpected empirical result can be leveraged into blocking more of their unwanted email.”
In this study, Clayton looked at more than 500 million emails that arrived at one UK ISP over an eight-week period.
