Zebras Get Less Spam Than Aardvarks

MojoKid writes "A recent study (PDF) by Richard Clayton at Cambridge University determined that the first letter of a someone's email address directly affects how much spam they receive. As shown in the graph at either link above, email addresses with numbers as their first characters receive even fewer spam emails. The corpus used in the study was 8 weeks' worth of email from the UK ISP Demon Internet, just over half a billion messages, of which 56% was deemed to be spam."

Comments

Re:You know what this means

[jack2000]

What is this spam you speak of, I'm using Gmail and todate I haven't seen a single instance of this so called "spam".

Re:You know what this means

[Chandon Seldon]

Gmail isn't perfect at filtering spam. I've received 35,214 spam messages in the last month. I estimate that Gmail failed to filter around 100 of them.

What?

[pablomme]

The conclusion is ridiculous. There's more spam for addresses starting with 'a' than with 'z' because there is more traffic to those addresses. See the the graph. The line in the graph is the only solid piece of information, and it is just a lot of noise around the mean value of 56%; if anything, it indicates the opposite conclusion.

Re:What?

[4thAce]

According to the PDF, this graph is for all email addresses, not for 'real' addresses, which they define, more or less, as those addresses which receive at least one non-spam email every other day. Since they are looking only at Demon's logs, not the contents of actual mailboxes, they have to use this heuristic to filter out the bogus combinations that the spammers are trying.

If they impose the condition that only 'real' addresses are considered, the graph changes to one with a higher percentage spam for A addresses than for Z addresses, as asserted in the summary.

The f*** article says otherwise

[paulatz]

I know nobody actually bothered to read it, but from the graph it looks like there are much more email addresses starting with an "a" than with a "z". The former get about as much spam as legit emails, while the latter get about 2 or 3 times more spam than legit emails.

Re:The f*** article says otherwise

[Anonymous Coward]

This is correct. And according to the Article, the Wallaby gets the lowest percentage of spam while the Zebra gets about the highest percentage of spam.

Re:You know what this means

[E IS mC(Square)]

Nothing is perfect when it comes to this. But they are the best among all 'free' email providers I have used - by miles. Now get in and flag them as spam - next time, you may receive fewer.

Sorry to break this to you.

[Colin Smith]

But in the real world there is no such thing as perfection. It is a philosophical construct.

 

Yes, the beginning of the alphabet gets more spam.

[Dynamoo]

Yes, the beginning of the alphabet gets more spam.. and it's really very simple to explain why.

Spammers work from lists of email addresses, and those email addresses are typically sorted by domain and then alphabetically. So, the receiving domain gets a rush of emails for users with addresses beginning with A, B, C etc. But usually (at some point) many mail systems will detect that there is a spam attack in progress and they will block subsequent messages of the same format or from the attacking IP address (depending on the spam filtering setup in place).

So, but simply the people beginning with "A" get nice new spam that the adaptive filters don't detect. By the time it gets to "Z" a good filter will automatically block the attack.

What's sad is that I watch spam attacks often enough to know this.