Order of the Bath

I have often wondered why, when all other things are equal, some people get more spam than others. Perhaps this is the answer. We know about dictionary spamming—that is trying every possible name before the @ on common (and uncommon) email servers. What seems to be happening is that this process is partially optimised so that more popular starting letters, ones that have more genuine accounts, are tried before less popular ones. So if your name starts with r, p, m or s then you will get more spam than if your name starts with q, w, y or z. It seems that it would be a good idea, if you have to change your account name, rather than become rick325@hotmail to try yyyrick or xyzzy.

This entry was posted on 2 Sep 2008 at 10:46 by Rick and is filed under email. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.