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Zebras Get Less Spam Than Aardvarks

Posted by kdawson on from the so-do-johns-and-smiths dept.

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."

4 of 115 comments (clear)

  1. You know what this means by Shajenko42 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Spammers will now alter their programs to start with "z" and numbers, so they can get the people who aren't as desensitized by spam.

    1. Re:You know what this means by cypherwise · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I'm (incorrectly?) assuming this comment was facetious. 100/35,214 (that's 99.71%) is a pretty damn good ratio when it comes to this type of thing.

  2. Re:What? by Oidhche · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Indeed. The conclusion that I'd draw from presented data is that there are more e-mail addresses beginning with 'a' than with 'z' (and that very few addresses begin with a number). Even the percentage of spam is nearly meaningless. To find anything about which addresses receive more spam, you should look at the average amount of spam per e-mail address in a given group, not the total number of messages.

  3. Re:What? by Oidhche · · Score: 3, Insightful

    No. Look at the data. It shows the total amount of messages received by Alberts and Zeds. It's painfully obvious that Alberts receive far more of both spam and genuine messages than Zeds. Not because the average Albert gets more messages than the average Zed, but because there are more Alberts than Zeds.