Spammers Targeting Certain Parts of Alphabet?

By Greg McNevin

September 3, 2008: New research from the UK’s Cambridge University has found that the first letter in an email address plays a large part in determining just how much spam one receives.

The study of over 500 million spam emails by computer scientist Dr Richard Clayton found that out addresses beginning with A, M, S, R and P received 40 percent or more junk email, while those beginning in Q or Z received only 20 percent.

Clayton says this is likely to be due to spammers auto-generating target email addresses based on common names or so-called dictionary attacks, with the number of junk emails seeming to specifically hinge on the first letter of the address.

That said, Clayton adds that there appears to be a large discrepancy over the amount of junk email between email addresses, as while spammers would naturally shy away from names beginning with uncommon letters (such as Q or Z), the letter U received a curiously large amount of spam (over 50 percent of email) despite being a less common letter to start a name with.

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