Richard Clayton at the University of Cambridge has made an interesting find regarding spam email. He claims that e-mail addresses which begin with certain letters receive more spam than others.

For eight weeks, Clayton studied a half of billion e-mails received by one UK ISP. After discounting addresses that were obviously not in use at the time of the study, he reports that his studies found that with an email address beginning with the letter “A” 30% of their mail was spam. An email address which began with “Z” had a finding of 20% spam e-mails. Why is there a difference?

I don’t think anyone knows for sure why there is a difference. Clayton theorizes that it may boil down to the spammer’s attempt to guess at e-mail addresses. Statistically there would be more e-mail addresses beginning with the letter A than Z. Getting a hit on an e-mail beginning with Z would be way less likely than randomly hitting on one that began with the letter A.

During his study, he also discovered that there were letters that received even more spam than the letter A, even though there were a smaller percentage of e-mail addresses beginning with the letters. These spam heavy letters included R, S, M and P. Of these letters, about 40% of the mail they received was spam.

It is not known if there is any significance in Clayton’s findings, as he has not yet done any statistical tests on his results. Spam is an annoyance to everyone, regardless of the letter your e-mail address begins with. It is interesting to know that there can be patterns that are found if someone takes the time to look hard enough.

Hopefully studies like these will help trace and put an end to spam e-mails and provide greater email protection.