Glaswegian

Alton is the most spammed town in the UK, according to an analysis by messaging service provider MessageLabs. But why does so much spam head to an innocuous town of 17,000 people in Hampshire?

The 2009 spam top ten reads, in order, Alton, Teddington, Havant, Cirencester, Brighton, Barking, Dundee, Swansea, Bromley, and Marlow. Last year's most spammed town, Egham, is now at number 14. The company also records the towns with the ‘lowest' levels of spam and the winner this year was Fareham, also in Hampshire, followed in second and third place by Lincoln and Wilmslow.

MessageLabs garnered these figures from a 31-day analysis of traffic to its own customer base, which has a bias towards the UK, despite the fact that the company was bought out a year ago by Symantec and has an international reach.

It is worth pointing out that the difference between the least and most spammed towns is actually the difference between places where spam now makes up 87.6 percent of all messages and 97.6 percent of all messages. So even in the best location, Fareham, nearly nine out of ten messages are spam.

Leaving aside a possible concentration of MessageLabs' customer base on the towns mentioned, why would more spam appear to head to one town over another? The nature of spam is its non-directed universality.

A possible explanation turns out to be the fascinating relationship between the number of domains registered to companies in a particular town relative to the size of company involved.

Very small companies - half a dozen people say - have only that number of people per domain, whereas larger companies might have hundreds or thousands of people per domain. Each real address is a target for the spammers, who use dictionary lookups of possible names in order to find the real people hiding behind the domains.

"If you have a domain then the spammer doesn't have to get the bit on the left [the name address]," points out MessageLabs' Paul Wood. "What you don't see is the mail server receiving and bouncing messages."

So spammers look at email-passing domains, not employee numbers when deciding where to send their junk, and that tends to mean that the smaller an outfit the more spam they will get relative to their numbers because they have more domains for fewer users.


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