Receiving more spam emails

**absolute55** · 03-09-2008

A new study has revealed that the unique user address chosen when creating a personal e-mail account can play a significant role in making that account more or less susceptible to Spam attacks.

The research study, which was carried out by University of Cambridge computer scientist Dr. Richard Clayton, found an interesting attack pattern after analyzing more than 500 million Spam e-mail messages.

Dr. Clayton’s research discovered that the very first letter of a person’s e-mail address can influence how much Spam their Inbox receives, with accounts beginning with the letters “A”, “M”, “S”, “R” or “P” attracting 40 percent junk mail while accounts beginning with the letters “Q”, “Y” or “Z” attract 20 percent or less.

According to the study, the percentage discrepancy can be partly attributed to the execution of “dictionary” attacks, a process whereby spammers increase the probability of success by attaching live e-mail name prefixes (before the @ part of the address) to other popular domain addresses (after the @ part of the address).

For example, a known account called Michael@email-account.com would lead to the creation of mails for other accounts such as Michael@another-email-account.com, and so-on, which would likely garner a greater number of account hits for the attacker.

However, that being said, Dr. Clayton suggested in his report that more pattern research is required -- not least because accounts beginning with “U”, a letter relatively uncommon at the start of e-mail addresses, were recorded as receiving 50 percent Spam mail.

The 550 million e-mail messages analysed by the study had been sent to customers of Internet service Demon between Feb 01 and March 27 of 2008, reports the BBC.

Source

**sayeed** · 10-09-2008

How is that possible, is there any trick or so? Can anyone explain it to me in simple language?

**Rkhon** · 10-09-2008

According to me its just the probability of having the email address starting with these letters like mentioned below.

Dr. Clayton’s research discovered that the very first letter of a person’s e-mail address can influence how much Spam their Inbox receives, with accounts beginning with the letters “A”, “M”, “S”, “R” or “P” attracting 40 percent junk mail while accounts beginning with the letters “Q”, “Y” or “Z” attract 20 percent or less.

As you can see “A”, “M”, “S”, “R” or “P” are more common letters for email id's while on the contrary “Q”, “Y” or “Z” are not so common infact very much rare.