# Generated username

A generated username is a local part that looks produced by a program or typed as a placeholder rather than chosen by a person: a hex string, a UUID, two letters and four digits, or test or asdf.

Date: 2026-09-13

A generated username is the part of an address before the @ that looks produced by a program, or typed as a placeholder, rather than chosen by a person: a hexadecimal string, a UUID, a long run of mixed-case letters and digits, one or two letters followed by four or more digits, a word followed by six or more digits, or a placeholder word such as test, fake, asdf or noname. Signup bots, scrapers and people filling a required field with anything produce them; customers rarely do.

## What Spaw answers

`looks_generated` reports the shape, and the `generated` weight of 20 applies. The rules are fixed and published on the field, and they are deliberately conservative: `mia1987` is a person and `krzysztof` is a name. The check is independent of `is_gibberish`, which reads a different shape — consonant mash — and both can fire on one address.

## What it does not mean

A generated-looking username can be a real mailbox: developers test with `test@` and some providers hand out numeric IDs. The signal is about how the username was made, and it earns its weight beside `widely_seen` and a young domain rather than on its own.

Reference: https://spaw.co/glossary/generated-username