Does your email address begin with A, M, S, R or P? 2 Sep 2008

After analysing more than 550 million email messages, Dr. Richard Clayton has discovered that email addresses that start with the letter "a", "m", "s", "r" or "p" are far more likely to attract spam than others. His research found that 40 percent of the messages sitting in the inboxes associated with these accounts were spam! (By contrast, the inboxes associated with email addresses beginning with "q" or "z" contained about 20 percent spam!)

So what? Well, this suggests that the majority of spammers are relying on "dictionary attacks" - attacks that involve these unscrupulous types taking an email address that they know is active and then trying the username part (i.e. the part of the address that comes before the "@" symbol) with loads of other domain names to generate new email addresses that might also be active. For example, spammers who know that john@example.com is an active email address might try john@another.com, john@yetanother.com and john@anotheronestill.com to see if they too point to live accounts.

So there you have it, Dr. Clayton has diagnosed the problem...all he has to do now is come up with a solution!