Aardvarks top zebras in spam stakes


A British researcher has found that email addresses that start with 'a' get the highest proportion of spam.

Richard Clayton from the University of Cambridge collected data from eight weeks worth of email traffic from a UK internet service provider - over half a billion messages - earlier this year.

He found that email addresses starting with 'a' received more than 30 per cent spam, while those starting with 'z' received less than 20 per cent spam.

The best way to avoid spam, the study found, was to have a number as the first character of your email address.

Of the 550,596,270 emails assessed during the study, 56 per cent were deemed to be spam.