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On the names we use in email

18 October 2014 21:50

Yesterday I received a small rush of SPAM mails, all of which were 419 scams, and all of them sent by "Mrs Elizabeth PETERSEN".

It struck me that I can't think of ever receiving a legitimate mail from a "Mrs XXX [YYY]", but I was too busy to check.

Today I've done so. Of the 38,553 emails I've received during the month of October 2014 I've got a hell of a lot of mails with a From address including a "Mrs" prefix:

"Mrs.Clanzo Amaki" <[email protected]>
"Mrs Sarah Mamadou"<[email protected]>
"Mrs Abia Abrahim" <[email protected]>
"Mrs. Josie Wilson" <[email protected]>
"Mrs. Theresa Luis"<[email protected]>

There are thousands more. Not a single one of them was legitimate.

I have one false-positive when repeating the search for a Mr-prefix. I have one friend who has set his sender-address to "Mr Bob Smith", which always reads weirdly to me, but every single other email with a Mr-prefix was SPAM.

I'm not going to use this in any way, since I'm happy with my mail-filtering setup, but it was interesting observation.

Names are funny. My wife changed her surname post-marriage, but that was done largely on the basis that introducing herself as "Doctor Kemp" was simpler than "Doctor Foreign-Name", she'd certainly never introduce herself ever as Mrs Kemp.

Trivia: In Finnish the word for "Man" and "Husband" is the same (mies), but the word for "Woman" (nainen) is different than the word for "Wife" (vaimo).

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Comments on this entry

icon Colin at 21:43 on 18 October 2014

It is a strange way to introduce yourself. But do you know how much Ham and how much Spam is introduced that way (just roughly)?

I love too how none of the names match their email addresses specifically. I get that investment@ or info@ would be quite generic and the names "Kathy Smith", etc would not match the email.

However "Mrs. Theresa Luis"tomaslima@jorgelima.com or mrs Abia Abrahim missfatimajinnah@yahoo.co.jp

I don't get it.

icon Steve Kemp at 23:02 on 18 October 2014
http://steve.org.uk/.

I'm not sure what you're asking about with regards to how much ham/spam?

But yeah, the name-mismatch is .. odd.

icon Elessar at 07:31 on 20 October 2014
http://tanguy.ortolo.eu/

Trivia: In French, as an exact reverse of Finish, the word for “woman” and “wife” is the same (« femme »), but the word for “man” (« homme ») is different than the word for “husband” (« mari »).