Ever wondered why your inbox seems to be constantly full of junk when no one else you know seems to receive any? According to new research it could all be to do with the first letter of your e-mail address.
E-mail accounts beginning with the letters A, M, P, R and S were found to be the most targeted whilst Q, Y and Z were most often left alone – often with a discrepancy worth 20% of an inbox.
Dr Richard Clayton, a computer scientist at the University of Cambridge, is presumably a man who suffers from junk mailers as he is the one behind the research. He explains his findings by trying to understand the way spammers send out their e-mails, saying that once they find one e-mail that works (for example email@address.com) then they will look for other addresses that begin email@. Because there are more e-mails accounts beginning with S than Q, it stands to reason that these will be found more often. If you find you sometimes have to struggle to get your desired username, you could well be heading for more spam; the more common your username, the more likely you are to be targeted.
This goes against conventional thinking that it was the e-mail provider that was targeted rather than the username.
More than 550 million e-mails were used in Dr Clayton’s research and his comprehensive search has only thrown up one anomaly – the letter U which seems to get more spam than any other letter despite there being relatively few addresses beginning with it.
Probing Deep has blogged about this story and from his experience it works out. He has two e-mail addresses, one beginning with M and the other F, and true to Dr Clayton’s claims the one starting with M receives a lot more spam. Others have decided that setting up an e-mail address as Quincy or Xavier is the way forward.
This news has previously been mis-reported as being about a letter’s position in the alphabet, but that has since been clarified.
September 3, 2008
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