----- Original Message ----- From: "Parker at Vip conduit" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Accessible Devices" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Saturday, September 06, 2008 8:18 PM Subject: Accessible Devices Study Reveals Your Address May Control TheAmount of SPAM You Receive
If you're tired of being deluged with SPAM this article is probably worth reading. The First Letter In Your Address May Determine How Much SPAM You Receive BBC NEWS Letter lottery defines spam load How much spam you get may depend on the first letter in your e-mail address, a study reveals. The analysis, of more than 500 million junk messages, revealed those letters that get more junk than average. It found that e-mail addresses starting with an "A", "M" or "S" got more than 40% spam. By contrast those beginning with a "Q" or "Z" got about 20%. The difference could be down to the way spammers generate e-mail addresses they want to target, said the study. Letter attack The analysis was carried out by University of Cambridge computer scientist Dr. Richard Clayton, in a bid to understand the widely noted discrepancies in the amounts of junk mail or spam that different people receive. Dr. Clayton took as his dataset the 550 million e-mail messages sent to customers of net service Demon between 1 February and 27 March 2008. Looking at the mix of messages landing in inboxes, Dr. Clayton found a wide discrepancy in the amounts of junk that different addresses received which seemed to hinge on their initial letters. The most popular letters for spammers were "A", "M", "S", "R" and "P". about 40% of all the messages arriving in the e-mail inboxes of accounts with addresses that had one of those characters as their first letter were junk. Much less popular were "Q", "Z" and "Y". For these cases, spam was running at about 20% or less. The reason for the difference could be partly explained, said Dr. Clayton, by the way that spammers generate e-mail addresses to which they then send junk messages. Often, he said, they carry out so-called "dictionary" attacks. In these, spammers take the part of a live e-mail address in front of the "@" symbol that they know is live, and add that to other net domain names to generate a new one. For instance, spammers who know that there is a real person attached to [EMAIL PROTECTED] may try [EMAIL PROTECTED] to see if that reaches a live account too. As a result the relative abundance of names beginning with "M" compared to "Q" could explain some of the disparities, as spammers would be more likely to re-use popular names and send them more junk. Dr. Clayton said the research had thrown up some anomalies that needed further research. For instance, he said, addresses starting with the letter "U" appear to get more than 50% spam despite there being relatively few of them. Story from BBC NEWS: http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/technology/7591370.stm Published: 2008/09/01 09:40:37 GMT © BBC MMVIII -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.accessible-devices.com/pipermail/a-d_accessible-devices.com/attachments/20080906/8998020e/attachment.html This is an Announce only list. Subscribers are not able to post to this list. To unsubscribe from the Accessible Devices list copy the line below. Paste it in the To: line of a blank message and send it. [EMAIL PROTECTED] Please feel free to pass this message on to a friend who might like to subscribe. To subscribe to Accessible Devices send a blank e mail to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Just follow the directions in the confirmation message when it comes. Please Note: Accessible Devices is not able to provide tech support for software or products that we supply information about. _______________________________________________ A-d mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.accessible-devices.com/mailman/listinfo/a-d_accessible-devices.com Join Access India convention: For updates on it visit: http://accessindia.org.in/harish/convention.htm Registration is now open! To unsubscribe send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the subject unsubscribe. To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please visit the list home page at http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in
