by having a long e-mail address which is punctuated with underscores. Each of the words is in the dictionary, but together they make an easily-remembered phrase.

e.g. (7-letter word)_(2-letter word)_(3-letter word)_(4-letter word)@somewhere.com

I get nada that ain't invited, and I can't believe it's down to wonderful filters.(It's Hotmail ferkrissakes....!)

NOTE TO REG STAFFERS WHO CAN SEE IT: THIS IS NOT AN INVITATION TO GIVE MY ADDRESS TO THE LADS FROM LAGOS!!!

... state the bloomin' obvious research paper.

Who would've thought that spammers could guess "john.smith@gmail.com" alot more easily than guessing "lucifer_von_beauforte_iii@gmail.com".

OHHHH hangman time, ideal sport on a friday afternoon:

(7-letter word)_(2-letter word)_(3-letter word)_(4-letter word)

I will guess at:

SCRUBER_IN_THE_BATH

Shurely it's more to do with the commonness of the actual name, not the first letter? In the article it is argued that addresses beginning with P and M get more spam, because they are common letters for names to begin with. I would have thought it's the other way round - addresses with common names in get more spam, and addresses beginning with P and M get more spam as they are more likely to include a common name?

Surely this was common sense? Apart from email address I don't care much about, picking up junk and noddy forums, my important email addresses for online purchases and friends are a convoluted mess of letters and numbers, as most spammers are bl**dy lazy and you can see the spam headers showing you alphabetical hits and dictionary based name generation.

Presumptuously assuming that everyone else has a Futurama fixation...

"Bending_in_the_Wind" ?

Does it really do any good to go after all the, say, 'P'eytons... it's not a common name. I think the researchers are oversimplifying, and are ignoring the viral aspect of spam, and the fact that spammers are often pretty smart. A more likely scenario would be if I have a common name, it's more likely to appear in someone's address book - and from there it's likely that it will get a dictionary of domains appended to it in brute force style spam (I've seen this happen when I was an email admin in a former life ;) Plus, that way you don't miss out on all the popular non-names... so if wow_druid@aol.com gets pulled from a compromised address book, wow_druid@gmail.com, wow_druid@hotmail.com, etc., will be tried and not overlooked.

lobster_in_our_bath@hotmail.com

Am I close? Can anyone get closer? :)

You're all hideously wrong! Never mind, some of them were quite entertaining - especially the Futurama ref. I think some of you guys need to get yourselves on Countdown!

@ chrisw: I've had the address for years now, I guess people don't auto-add me to their books, or that they haven't been scanned - at least I haven't received spam as a result, either way. Maybe the spam lists can't handle the addy length? (19 chars before the @)

@ steogede: I could compare Hotmail to a lot of parts of a dog's anatomy, but none of 'em are complimentary.... I mainly use it for legacy reasons (had it for the best part of a decade, before GMail etc) and it's the address I use for a lot of forums etc - I'm just too lazy to change them all!

I tend to use my Hotmail account for registering with websites, then on my proper email account I use BoxTrapper, so unless I've added you as a friend, or new people have replied to the validation email. No Spam gets through my Inbox has remained spam free for the last few years.

Anyone else here always use Aaron Aardvark as their system test user?

Gmail catches pretty much all the spam I get - plus all the forum post notifications / facebook spam / anything else I can't be arsed turning off on the actual site...

I also use the username+website@gmail.com thing so if I do actually get any spam I can see exactly who sold my address on and double check their privacy policy before setting the dogs of war loose on them :)

More importantly WTF are Demon Internet playing at handing out details of e-mails to third parties? Surely this is breach of data protection

Screw gmail, get yourself a barracuda in front of your mail cluster and you're good to go, virus / spam free.

We cut off about 96% of our mail traffic just by installing one... heck my mail server is sleeping.

Other solutions work, yet, having more complex names isn't even remotely useful in the near future, they'll just adapt.

Guess it's too late to change my name. For now I'll just have to use a spam guard like SpamBully to keep myself from drowning in this stuff!