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Amount Of Spam Depends On First Letter In Email Address

news.bbc.co.uk — The analysis, of more than 500 million junk messages, revealed those letters that get more junk than average. It found that e-mail addresses starting with an "A", "M" or "S" got more than 40% spam. By contrast those beginning with a "Q" or "Z" got about 20%.

Who dugg this? Made popular Sep 2, 2008

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  • Spyder810, on 09/02/2008, -5/+37Figures mine starts with an s. Oh wait! I use Gmail! No spam in my inbox.
  • Pusod, on 09/02/2008, -4/+30The best way to prevent spam... get GMAIL.
  • Rotzooi, on 09/02/2008, -2/+26Nitpicking: you're still getting the spam, just not in your inbox.
  • mynameistux, on 09/02/2008, -0/+16I love gmail.
    PRAISE GOOGLE!
  • mynameistux, on 09/02/2008, -0/+12that you sign up for too many porn sites, why do you ask?
  • silversilver, on 09/02/2008, -2/+1140% I wish... my 10 year old email address and starts with "S" I get 95% spam what does that tell you?
  • netneutrality, on 09/01/2008, -3/+11Link to the actual study; there's a graph in it: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rnc1/aardvark.pdf
  • solidus636, on 09/02/2008, -0/+8Yeah, Rotzooi is right. I get lots of spam, hundreds every day, but almost none of it comes in my inbox.
  • EvilCan, on 09/02/2008, -0/+7Was that statement from the Department of Redundancy Department?
  • inactive, on 09/02/2008, -2/+9Pretty sure this is dumb...

    Email addresses beginning with Q or Z would get less spam than others because of the same reason there aren't as many Q's and Z's in Scrabble - they're less common.

    You'd assume the amount of non-spam anybody would get would be constant (because for the purposes of a study, everyone's using their email for the same thing). So if a spammer is sending ***** out to every email he can get his hands on, it'd just come back to the ratio of what's out there to begin with.

    (Dude wasted his time).
  • zarcu, on 09/02/2008, -1/+8I have an email that starts with z and ends with gmail. I'm invincible.
  • jamauss, on 09/02/2008, -5/+10The letter "P" wasn't far behind those top 3 - making the analysis quite ironic.
  • nachowski, on 09/02/2008, -0/+5The conclusions in this study are a load of crap.

    If you look at the original paper ( http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rnc1/aardvark.pdf ), the graph on page 2 shows a higher amount of spam for emails beginning with 'a' than 'z', BUT this is only because there are more email addresses that start with 'a'!The ratio of spam to non-spam is actually much higher for the "zebras" (around 18%) than for the aardvarks (around 12%). These are quite meaningless numbers to draw any valid conclusions. In fact this study probably proves the opposite of what it is asserting.
  • iamichi, on 11/12/2008, -0/+4Totally. I moved my domain to Google Apps and have had about 2 spam emails in my inbox since (and about 30-40 spam emails in my Spam folder each day). It's impressive.
  • netneutrality, on 09/01/2008, -4/+8Must suck if you have your own domain with a catch-all email account.
  • MegaSilver, on 09/02/2008, -0/+4Dvorak must have an email address starting with Q or Z
  • Phlieger, on 09/02/2008, -1/+5So true.
  • silversilver, on 09/02/2008, -0/+3Don't sign up for ***** :p
  • Hidama, on 09/01/2008, -6/+9I wish there was a percentage breakdown for each letter, but at least I know what letters to avoid.
  • jcaino, on 09/02/2008, -0/+3Also, e-mail addresses like "info@domain", "contact@domain" or pretty much any other dictionary word will also get spammed to hell and back.
  • GliliumHkY, on 09/02/2008, -0/+3Mine starts with G. Oh wait...G for Gmail!
  • sgtbutterscotch, on 09/02/2008, -1/+4meh. i don't get spam in my yahoo inbox. then again, sometimes some stuff i need gets sent to the spam folder, but that's not hard to fix.
  • altgeeky1, on 09/02/2008, -1/+4I can't believe someone buried this. Yes, Google has awesome anti-spam: nothing bad in the Inbox and nothing seems to be blackholed (it's all in the anti-spam folder, very few false positives... just Meritline newsletters, and they rank high on my company's internal spam filter, for doing brain dead http://ip.ip.ip.ip:81 stuff)
  • erossmu, on 09/02/2008, -0/+2same with echomote, I only get a few spam messages a year. I'm surprised spam is still a problem, I haven't had to deal with spam since I was invited to join gmail beta.
  • BloggerJohn, on 09/02/2008, -1/+3this is OLD, buried.
  • aenima987, on 09/02/2008, -0/+2You can smell a bot?
  • Sabretou, on 09/02/2008, -0/+2Gmail or not, I think modern spam filters are doing a good job anyways.
  • davidkshepherd, on 09/02/2008, -0/+1Maybe it has more to do with the distribution of english words... Since most the crap I see these days is just a random blast at guessed email addresses...
  • Myztry, on 09/02/2008, -0/+1That's assuming they aren't simply generating names. Creating nick quality names is trivial.
    Just alternative between consonant and vowel sets [b,c,ch,d,f,g,gr,...] [a,e,ee,i,o,oo,...] random [3-5] times.
    The less rare characters include in the sets, the less iterations required to hit common nicks.
    I used a similar thing for generating random D&D character names many moons ago.
  • cyberprashant, on 09/02/2008, -0/+1It might be statistically flawed. The majority of email address prob begin with A, M, S and very little with q or Z so of course, A, M, S are going to have the most email arriving in the 550 million emails studied and it'll look like they get the majority of the spam.

    lame.
  • xkorbin, on 09/02/2008, -0/+1In any case, how could the accuracy of the results be verified with such varying amounts of spam that people get. It's not like he can control how much the spiders send his subjects.
  • pukiman, on 09/02/2008, -0/+1And dupe: http://digg.com/security/Why_Adam_gets_more_spam_t ...
  • mozert, on 09/02/2008, -0/+1ssssssssupersnake at gmail.com
  • grantmc1, on 09/02/2008, -0/+1that's what i was thinking, how many people do you know with the email address z? i know none, but i know about 20 people with a email starting with a.
  • changyang1230, on 09/02/2008, -1/+2Spam PER INBOX, not the SUM of spam for emails beginning with those alphabets.

    If you are a spammer and you get hold of, say, 500 non-rare-alphabet emails and 100 rare-alphabet emails, would you send 100 spams to each of the former and 50 to each of the latter?

    You won't. You will send the same amount of spam to everyone, rare alphabet or not. And that's why your argument above didn't make sense.
  • Meocross, on 09/02/2008, -0/+1This article cant be serious. then that means you can tell apart a troll from the crowd if he keeps using the letter H as his first letter.
  • winmywii, on 09/02/2008, -0/+1My own domains get spammed less than my gmail or comcast accounts. Pretty much no spam on my own domains.
  • quazywabbit, on 09/02/2008, -0/+1no matter what spam still comes in. and well 20% is still a lot ,but im glad its not more.
  • Echomote, on 09/02/2008, -0/+1I'm completely honest in saying I get about 4 per half a year
  • jcaino, on 09/02/2008, -0/+1Well, catch-alls aren't exactly a good idea, and haven't been for some time. If your host only allows you to create a catch-all address or forward, then you need to find a new host.
  • modirebikar, on 09/02/2008, -0/+1suddenly spammers read this article and they should brake this rule earliest as they can!
  • jcaino, on 09/02/2008, -2/+3You lie. I bet you still get spam in your inbox occasionally. I know I do. GMail is good, but it ain't perfect. No spam filter is fool-proof.
  • ZachSka87, on 09/02/2008, -0/+1I get at least 1-3 spam messages per day slipping in from companies I did not solicit, and I use GMail. Once again, I love it, but it's not perfect, people.
  • yurimxpxman, on 09/02/2008, -1/+2Wasn't this on the front page a couple days ago?
  • mdman, on 09/04/2008, -0/+1Just becuse some letters are more popular among email address,s does not mean spammers target those letters..

    They target ALL letters, there just happen to be more of some of them..
  • erossmu, on 09/02/2008, -0/+1Appeal to Authority, that is a logical fallacy my friend.
  • JakeW, on 09/02/2008, -0/+1I don't think you should be avoiding letters in your Email address, though. Just the sites that don't have a good privacy policy or spam policy.
  • macjonesnz, on 09/02/2008, -0/+1Breaking news ! - The analysis, of more than 500 million "peoples names", revealed some start with letters used more than average. It found that people with names starting with an "A", "M" or "S" are more common than those beginning with a "Q" or "Z".
  • silversilver, on 09/03/2008, -0/+1Exactly so the article is wrong then.
  • GoblinSoul, on 09/02/2008, -0/+1Indeed. I actually used Hotmail at one point (Shock Horror), and never got any Spam at all. I switched to GMail and after about a month or so, I started getting random Spam e-mails. They get put in the "Spam" folder, but it still annoys me having to delete them all.
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