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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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