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

I bet this guy gets the least amount of spam

[Anonymous Coward]

We had an ex-city manager, who had a son named Zachary Z. Zoul.

Very little spam at demon.uk

[Teun]

56% percent deemed spam?

I thought most in the know see a far higher percentage, my ISP records over 95%:

Xs4all statistics

Makes me wonder about the rest.

Re:Unexpected

[xaxa]

I'd guess that addresses with numbers at the beginning are often invalid, so they don't bother with them. I get spam attempts addressed to message IDs, which are generally something like 238947529345user@example.com.

Re:You know what this means

[arth1]

I think this might be a distant relative to Benford's law (the one that shows that about 30% of all counted numbers will start with the digit "1", not 10% as one might think).

Going through some crack and john-the-ripper logs, I saw that there was a good correlation between the position in the alphabet not only for the passwords, but also for the user names.
Based on pure letter frequency, you'd think that there would be a typical E-R-S-T-N ranking, but this doesn't appear to be the case for the initial letter. It appears to be far more often "a" than "e" or "s".

(The letter "r" is special and overrepresented due to the "root" user ID not only being ubiquitous on Unix-like systems, but also being the prime target for crack and john.)

Oh really?

[Antony-Kyre]

I just created the e-mail address zh80lukgwggok4kko0kcbrhjm@hotmail.com (yes, seriously)

Now, let's see if that holds true.

Re:You know what this means

[uncqual]

I find gmail almost perfect at classifying spam as such.

Unfortunately, gmail is my only mail account where I feel I have to scan the spam "folder" every week or so to look for false positives -- of which there are a couple a month. My other accounts, which receive more mail and more spam (both as a percentage and an absolute number), have given so few false positives that I don't bother looking in the spam folders on those accounts.

So, unfortunately, I end up looking at all the spam on gmail and just a little of it on other accounts. I don't think this is a win.