The Lonely Yuliya

I was checking my university emails today, when i found this gem of an email that had been sent to me...


The Email


Charming isnt it...

Now, this leaves you with two states of mind. 1) this poor russian girl so badly wants to find love that she has poured her heart out in a very sweet and meaningful message, or 2) its spam. Being the synic that i am, i automatically assumed that it was spam, and, as i do everytime i suspect something of being spam, I inputed the suggested email address into the great google machine. And it popped up with this blog - http://mattwhatsit.net/2012/02/01/from-russia-with-love/ - I reccomend you view it - the guys response was absolutely hillarious!!! end of story. mystery solved.

But this kinda got me thinking about availability of information. my address is a university email adress, so in theory, should only be public to other members of the university, and those who I have given this email address too. And since I have never given this address out to anyone (thats what my hotmail account is for) it is clearly someone else.

Well, according to seanet (http://www.seanet.com/help/email/spam.shtml#2a) spammers can get hold of your email adress in the following ways:

They run programs that collect e-mail addresses out of Usenet posting headers.

They cull them from subscriber lists (such as AOL's Member Profile list).

They use web-crawling programs that look for e-mail addresses on web pages.

They take them out of online directories.

They buy databases of addresses.

They take them from you without your knowledge when you visit a web site.

They collect member names from online "chat" rooms.

However, as I have said, I do not use this email adress for anything other than emailing lecturers and fellow students. I have used it to send approximately one external email (to a potential employer). There is very little chance of any of these reasons being the case.

So this only leaves a few other ways. I suspect wholey that it was through random address generation. my email adress at the university is fairly short (only 5 letters - not by choice - it was preset by the uni). It has 2 letters 3 numbers -

there are 26 letters in the alphabet and it is a combination of 2 letters - which provides 676 possible combinations of the 2 letters.
There is also 1000 different 3 digits numbers from 000 to 999.
this means that my address could be potentially one in 676000.

And because my address is one allocated by a University, it is easier to guess the address. this is because universities tend to be more systematic with their allocations of addresses, so its more certain that they will be at least partly sucessful, and because its to a university adress, if your gullible, you are more likely to trust its validity.

In conclusion, this made for a very entertaining read - particularly when read in an upperclass accent ;)