Junk emails could eat as much as 512 TB every day

by Brad Linder Dec 19th 2007

You know those few thousand junk emails you've got sitting in your spam folder? Odds are they're only eating up a few megabytes on your server (we just deleted 2968 and freed up a whopping 8MB), but what would that mean if you multiplied that number by all the email accounts in the world?

The folks at Pingdom did a rough calculation and determined that spam eat up 512 terabytes of space every single day. The calculation is pretty rough. In a nutshell, they took an estimate that 120 billion spam emails are sent every day, and then multiplied that number by 4.37 kilobytes, or the size of a typical junk email message.

In other words, email service providers are wasting a lot of money on server space for junk messages. Of course, the only reason spammers send their emails is because for every few thousand people that ignore their pleas, a handful of people will click on a link and buy something, fall for a scam, or inadvertently install a virus or trojan on their PC. So for now, the best solution is to use an email service like Gmail that includes an excellent junk mail filter, and never ever look at your spam folder. But it'd be nice if there was a way to just make those emails all go away.

[via CyberNet]

Tags: junk-email, junk-mail, spam

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

robotrock said 9:26PM on 12-19-2007

even though 99% of my junk mail goes into my spam folder on my gmail account...I still get lots of it...tons of it.

on my AOL account (laugh...go ahead I deserve it) I hardly get any...kind of strange since AOL used to be the spam hub

Ashraf said 10:21AM on 12-20-2007

some e-mail providers, like Yahoo!, sells your information...

I haven't used my Gmail or my AOL accounts with any websites, so I dont get any junk e-mails.

for Yahoo....I do..

Tim said 11:25PM on 12-23-2007

The point isn't that you don't get spam with Gmail. It's that you don't see spam, and thus are less likely to fall for something and make spamming worth the time and money it costs the sender.

michael said 5:53PM on 12-20-2007

I use Live Hotmail and I never get spam.

These days, web mail is secure, and if you're still getting a ton of spams, you might oughta try keeping it to yourself and as few people as possible. Don't hand it out to just anyone on the web.

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