A Cambridge University study has
uncovered bad news for the Adams and Alisons of this world. According to their
research you are more likely to receive spam if your name, and by consequence
your e-mail address, starts with a letter towards the beginning of the
alphabet. Richard Clayton, the security expert who
ran the study, explained the trend by saying that spammers will often use a
"dictionary" method of disseminating spam. This means they start at
the beginning of the dictionary predicting e-mail addresses such as
aaron.smith@hotmail.com and work up the alphabet from there. By the time they reach Zach they may well have given
up. It will be interesting to see whether these findings have any effect on
naming trends amongst IT professionals. We could see whole generations of Zivs
and Zondas steering IT through the 21st century.
