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]