Research Finds Spam is as easy as A,B,C
Research into why people receive differing amounts of spam in their inboxes has found that if your email address begins with an A, M, S, R or P, you are likely to receive 40 percent more junk mail.
In contrast, email addresses that start with the letters Q, Z and Y, receive less than a fifth of their mail as spam.
Richard Clayton, a computer scientist a Cambridge University carried out the study. He said that he believed the difference could be explained by the first set of letter being more likely to appear at the start of names than the second set.
This is because the people behind junk emails carry out so-called “dictionary” attacks, in which they attempt to guess new addresses by taking the prefix of an existing address and placing it in front of alternative domain names, such as hotmail.com or yahoo.co.uk.
The research studied 550 million email messages sent to customers of the Demon Internet service between February 1st and March 27th this year.
Dr Clayton presented his findings at a conference on email and anti-spam in Mountain View, California last month. He said: “Measuring incoming email has shown that the first letter of email addresses makes a difference to the proportion of incoming spam.”
He believes results could help further the development of anti-spam measures.
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150 billion spams a day - WebProWorld said :
May 12, 2009 at 1:48 pm
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