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

You know what this means

[Shajenko42]

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.

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.

Re:You know what this means

[cypherwise]

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.

Re:You know what this means

[AngryLlama]

Why would spammers look for email addresses in their own working directory (./)? I guess I am just not up-to-date on my spamming techniques.

This is silly

[knappe duivel]

Zebra's and aardvarks don't eat Spam. Or ham.

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?

[Oidhche]

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.

Re:What?

[Oidhche]

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.

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:I bet this guy gets the least amount of spam

[eln]

Did the city manager get fired because every time anyone tried to talk to him about city management, he would say, "There is no city manager, only Zoul"?

I'm so sorry.

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.