The amount of spam that you receive may be related to the first letter of your email address according to new research from Cambridge University. Dr Richard Clayton analysed more than 500 million junk messages, and found a noticeable trend.
If your email address starts with either “A”, “M” or “S” you’re in the unfortunate grouping that receives more than 40 per cent spam. However if your name is Quentin or Zara or for some other reason you have an email address beginning with a “Q” or “Z”, you are only susceptible to about 20 per cent of spam.
The study believes that difference could be down to the way spammers generate e-mail addresses that they are looking to target. Spammers often carry out “dictionary attacks” where they take the start of an email address before the @ sign, and attach it to different domain names to see if they work as well.
As there are more Sallys, Sarahs, Sams and Steves than Qitarahs or Zalans, spammers are more likely to re-use popular names and send them more junk.
The study did throw up a few anomalies though, including addresses starting with the letter “U” appearing to get more than 50 per cent spam emails. Unfortunate for all of those Umbertos out there.
Source: BBC
2 thoughts on “Spammers target the first letter of your email address”
The ‘U’ thing surprises me – maybe it’s because a lot of publicly-published email addresses begin with words like ‘unsubscribe’. Not sure though. Given the popularity of my name (chris at lgblog) I get a lot of spam every day – now I know why!
That’s an interesting idea actually! You may be on to something there.
I knew it had to be a more straightforward reason than a lot of Uma Thurman impersonators logging on.