That you receive via email

Aug 29, 2008 12:21 GMT  ·  By
An email address starting with the letter 'a' may receive more spam than one starting with 'z'
   An email address starting with the letter 'a' may receive more spam than one starting with 'z'

Richard Clayton, a researcher working at the Computer Laboratory from the University of Cambridge, has published the findings of one of his latest studies, which aimed at determining whether the amount of spam someone receives depends on their names or not. Of course, the research was performed bearing in mind only the situation in which the real name of a person has anything to do with their address, and completely ignoring the [email protected], [email protected] or similar cases.

 

According to the researcher, people whose email addresses start with the letter “a” have nearly 15% more chances to get their email account flooded by spam than, say, the ones who chose their account names using words starting with the letter “z”. The Cambridge professor, however, is determined to reassure all those who, after learning the results of the study, were inclined to let their imagination run wild and rename their accounts from work with who knows what eccentricities.

 

His first argument is that the finding only applies to the “real addresses,” namely to those which receive at least one non-spam email every other day. In any case, the big gap between spam stats could derive from the fact that some spammers use dictionary attacks. This method consists in that the identification name on the left of the “@” mark may be used by the same person with different email clients.

 

The addresses that happen not to receive at least one email within two days were considered to be generated by spammers, so they could have gotten lost in the researcher's list of inactive emails. When taking into account all the addresses, no matter if suspected to be automatically generated or real, the results of the study turned out completely different. Overall, people with unusual names or with names starting with a letter towards the end of the alphabet were indicated to have received more spam than those whose names started with “a”, “b” or “c”.

 

So, apparently, as long as the actually existent addresses cannot be determined accurately, studies like this one are bound to offer questionable results. “Turning the results around – there are some hints here about viable anti-spam policies. Although classifying email addresses by the amount of non-spam email received is not a very sensible way of deciding whether future messages will be spam or not, it does seem clear that there is a significant gain in spam filtering efficiency to be gained from making the ISP email reception systems aware of all valid email addresses.” Clayton concludes.