Say what? A researcher in England discovered that, for real email addresses, those beginning with less common letters receive less spam. So that means that if your name is Mike Xanowitz, you might want to have your email address as xanowitzm@mydomain.com instead of mxanowitz@mydomain.com. M’s, you see, get more spam than X’s.

This is just one study but the results feel right to me. Think about it another way. mike@mydomain.com sounds pretty general, even if mydomain.com isn’t so well known. xanowitz@mydomain.com on the otherhand is pretty specific. So if I were trying to send unsolicited commercial messages (otherwise known as spam) to this domain, I might get lucky and guess that mike@ is a valid email address. But unless I know Mike personally and know how to spell his last name, I’m unlikely to simply guess at xanowitz@ and be right.

Does it mean anything to you? Perhaps not if you already have an established email. If however you’re in the process of creating a new email address, consider a lesser used first letter such as x, y or z for your email address.

You’d go crazy, right? Well what would you say if they shared your email with the government, unbeknownst to you? Since your ISP ensures that your email gets to  you, and since you’d be mad at them if it didn’t get to you, did you know they had a copy of my email?

What am I getting at? Well today, June 19, 2007, a federal appeals court affirmed that as business owners we have an expectation of privacy of emails, even emails stored on your ISP’s server. The ruling says that the government has to get a warrant to get those emails. This is definitely a win for small business owners (large businesses typically have all their emails stored on their own servers).