I'm doing a research project on spam and I was wondering if anyone had an accurate and up-to-date estimation of spam messages sent per year (or per day). One source I found says that about 25 million spam messages are sent per day, does that sound right?

If you have anything that could help me, please reply. (If you have a statistic -- please post the source too)

Thanks!

:spam:

wrong wrong, in last 2 months i busted around 4 peoples spaming from my servers, each of them had more then 1 millions email addresses and all of them succeed. now it was only me, imagine the number of people doing that from 1,000's other companies servers. :angry:

mahinder,

Were those spammers using some sort of cgi script to send the spam using sendmail or something? But don`t most hosts (or can`t they) have restrictions so you can`t use it to send more than 1,000 or so email address before haulting the script or whatever?

Well 25 million spam messages a day is about 20 messages per Internet user (500 million users) -- some may receive more and some may receive less. I only get about 5-6 spam messages in my hotmail inbox a day.

Originally posted by mindboggle
Well 25 million spam messages a day is about 20 messages per Internet user (500 million users) -- some may receive more and some may receive less. I only get about 5-6 spam messages in my hotmail inbox a day.

I think you did that calculation a bit wrong :-)

Originally posted by jks


I think you did that calculation a bit wrong :-)
What's wrong with it? Could you give me a more accurate calculation... I can't find anything else.

Originally posted by mindboggle

What's wrong with it? Could you give me a more accurate calculation... I can't find anything else.

Ehm, try doing the numbers.

You say: 25 million messages per day
You say: 500 million users

You say: That is 20 messages per user.

If you do the math:

25 * 10^6
--------------- = 25/500 = 0,05 messages per user per day.
500 * 10^6

Apart from that, the "exact" number of users on the internet was according to CNN 498 million.

The figure saying 25 million spam emails a day is probably a "wild guess". With a bit more digging I could probably come up with a better guess, but haven't got time for that right now.

Heh, whoops, I did 500/25

I guess I'll just look around for some more accurate results.

Originally posted by mindboggle
500 million users / 25 million messages = 20 messages per user

That's simply incorrect; you have your units wrong.


500 * 10^6 users
--------------------------- = 20 users per message
25 * 10^6 messages


I.e. 0.05 messages per user.

And NOT 20 messages per user.

Originally posted by mindboggle
Heh, whoops, I did 500/25

I guess I'll just look around for some more accurate results.

Hmm, you edited your post it seems? :-)

Yeah, right after I hit submit I realized that it didn't make sense, I didn't even see your other post. :)

Now is that 25 million that acually reach people? Remember people love to random names infront of @yahoo and @aol, etc domains and send that out. I would think more is prob sent that just never reaches anyone.