Spam Goes Down To The Letter

A new study by a University of Cambridge computer scientist revealed that the first letter of your email address makes a difference in how much spam you get. It found that addresses that start with “A” “M” or “S” get more than 40% spam while those starting with Q or Z get only about 20% spam.

Dr. Richard Clayton analyzed over 500 million spam messages and discovered that “A” “M” “S” “R” and “P” are favorites of spammers. He says this has to do with the dictionary attacks spammers use to generate addresses to spam. There are simply more names starting with those letters than any others. However some exceptions to this rule were found. For example, email addresses starting with “U” get over 50% spam despite it being an unpopular letter for names to start with.

I can say that Dr. Clayton seems to be on to something. I have an email address beginning with “S” as my first name is Sue. I also have another email address that begins with “N”. The “S” address definitely gets a lot more spam than the “N” address does. Right now the “S” address’s spam folder has 30 messages in it, while the “N” address’s spam folder only has 17. Interesting!!