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" <marilobouabre14@yahoo.co.jp> "Mrs Sarah Mamadou"<investment@payment.com> "Mrs Abia Abrahim" <missfatimajinnah@yahoo.co.jp> "Mrs. Josie Wilson" <linn3_2008@yahoo.co.jp> "Mrs. Theresa Luis"<tomaslima@jorgelima.com>
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).
Tags: email, names, random, spam 3 comments