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

[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.

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.

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.