Is the Internet overwhelmed by spam?
I was looking at some statistics yesterday about how the volume of spam has increased over the past year, and having a look at some projections. Over 3 days in December 2003, Hotmail processed about 3 billion messages, 2.7 billion of them were spam, which equates to about 10% of mail actually making it to a mailbox. During one day this month, 3.78 billion were processed with 3.39 billion being rejected as spam, either being rejected at the server, or dropped by the connection. So if 90% of traffic reaching Hotmail (and thousands of other mail servers) is spam, what a waste of processing cycles, resources and electricity! It makes me wonder just how fast the Internet would be if it was free from all of this spurious spam traffic.
Oh, and by the way, spam should always be referred to in lower case. SPAM (upper case) is the registered trademark of the company that makes the canned meat product, and they're very keen to keep it that way in case some time in the future, people forget the origin of the nickname for Unsolicited Commercial Email (UCE) and incorrectly link SPAM meat with unwanted email.