SPAM - was just wondering!!

I managed to find interesting data-points about the emails sent over internet in the year 2009.

• 90 trillion – The number of emails sent on the Internet in 2009.
• 247 billion – Average number of email messages per day.
• 1.4 billion – The number of email users worldwide.
• 100 million – New email users since the year before.
• 81% – The percentage of emails that were spam.
• 92% – Peak spam levels late in the year.
• 24% – Increase in spam since last year.
• 200 billion – The number of spam emails per day (assuming 81% are spam).

The carbon footprint of spam email can be phenomenal. The share of spam was at 81% of all the emails, that is 72.9 trillion emails in the year 2009. To store/forward/transmit such a vast amount of email may take huge amount of infrastructure that consumes lot of power. All this is to send the emails to the junk folder where they are never opened. Something must be done to address this than just filtering, which does not address the real problem.

Source: http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/01/22/internet-2009-in-numbers/