107 trillion emails sent last year: Pingdom

January 14, 2011
A woman looks at her email

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A woman looks at her email on a computer screen in Washington 2010. Internet users sent a total of 107 trillion emails last year, most of them spam, according to a Web monitoring service.

Internet users sent a total of 107 trillion emails last year, most of them spam, according to a Web monitoring service.

The number of emails sent last year were among the facts and figures about the Internet gathered by Pingdom from various sources and published Thursday at royal.pingdom.com/2011/01/12/internet-2010-in-numbers/.

Pingdom said that as of June 2010, there were 1.97 billion Internet users: 825.1 million in Asia, 475.1 million in Europe, 266.2 million in North America, 204.7 million in Latin America and the Caribbean, 110.9 million in Africa, 63.2 million in the Middle East and 21.3 million in Oceania and Australia.

Pingdom said an average of 294 billion messages were sent per day and about 89 percent were spam.

It said there are 2.9 billion email accounts worldwide and 152 million blogs.

The total number of websites is 255 million, Pingdom said, up 21.4 million over the previous year.

It said there were 88.8 million .com , 13.2 million .net domain names, 8.6 million .org domain names and 79.2 million country code domains such as .cn or .uk.

Pingdom also published figures on the growth of Twitter and .

added 100 million new accounts last year and had a total of 175 million as of September, Pingdom said, adding that 25 billion messages, or "," were sent in 2010.

Facebook had nearly 600 million users at the end of the year with 250 million joining in 2010.

(c) 2011 AFP

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Quantum_Conundrum
Jan 14, 2011

Rank: 3 / 5 (4)
Pingdom said an average of 294 billion email messages were sent per day and about 89 percent were spam.


Sick.

If someone doesn't solve the botnet spam problem the serverse are going to be completely crippled within a few more years. They'll be sending tens and hundreds of times as much spam as the number of infected computers rises, and the computers are faster and faster.
Modernmystic
Jan 14, 2011

Rank: 3 / 5 (2)
Well that explains where the other 106 trillion came from...

Long distance relationships suck...no really they do.
panorama
Jan 14, 2011

Rank: not rated yet
What I don't get is the fact that the majority of the spam emails I receive are so incoherent to the point of laughter. "You pay 20% of the price. Empire in southeastern to revolution." That was the subject of the last one I received. How do people benefit from sending those?
Quantum_Conundrum
Jan 14, 2011

Rank: 1 / 5 (3)
What I don't get is the fact that the majority of the spam emails I receive are so incoherent to the point of laughter. "You pay 20% of the price. Empire in southeastern to revolution." That was the subject of the last one I received. How do people benefit from sending those?


there are several possibilities.

It could be a bad translation of a foreign language, so it has no meaning, or links dont work, etc.

Or it could be a coded message between the hackers themselves. Codes, concealment, and cyphers are probably used by the terrorists and hackers right under our noses, and we'd not have any way of knowing it. Think about the indian code during WW2...
Quantum_Conundrum
Jan 14, 2011

Rank: 1 / 5 (3)
Thinking back to the days of chat bots which were made for "clan wars" in Starcraft and Broodwar in the late 1990's, I remember the "%" Sign is often used as an escape operator in botspeak, designating a wild card variable.

The message you list could be a coded command from one node on the botnet to another. Which is to say, one computer may be sending a coded command to another computer, or broadcasting it to all the computers.

So, for example, when an user on an infected computer reads their email, the command is read by the trojan to change it's mode of operation. This could be parameters for an actual script being run by the trojan on each machine.
Paljor
Jan 14, 2011

Rank: not rated yet
Well i can garuntee i got a lot of spam from "non spamming sites" (at least a couple hundred in the past year alone....) Which sucked, can't you just automaticly choose a sites URL or domain and delete any messages coming from that site. And perhaps not only that but also any people you want.
Quantum_Conundrum
Jan 14, 2011

Rank: 3 / 5 (2)
can't you just automaticly choose a sites URL or domain and delete any messages coming from that site. And perhaps not only that but also any people you want.


Nope.

The spammers are the computers which are under control of the viruses or trojans. There is no way for any filter to know who is a legitimate messenger or for what purpose the message is being sent.

The spam message is not coming from a server or a domain name. It's coming from a PC owned by your neighbour down the street, or some other complete stranger somewhere in the world, and he doesn't even realize it.
dtxx
Jan 14, 2011

Rank: 5 / 5 (1)
Pingdom said an average of 294 billion email messages were sent per day and about 89 percent were spam.


Sick.

If someone doesn't solve the botnet spam problem the serverse are going to be completely crippled within a few more years. They'll be sending tens and hundreds of times as much spam as the number of infected computers rises, and the computers are faster and faster.


You DO know that the system's speed is not the rate limiting factor on how quickly e-mails are sent, right? Of course you don't, because you don't know anything about how these things really work. You have a grain of information, and you're building a sand dune of speculation on it. I'm not going to bother ripping apart the rest of what you posted here. You can pay me by the hour if you want me to be your educator. To anyone who actually works in the field though your comments range from slightly off base to comical.
gmurphy
Jan 14, 2011

Rank: 3.7 / 5 (3)
@dtxx, slightly off base?, I'd say completely insane. If there was a latin equivalent of bat-shit crazy, that's the term I'd use :), btw, I'd like to know what fraction of the spam actually reaches inboxes, once the filters have processed them, I rarely have to deal with spam these days.
Bob_Kob
Jan 14, 2011

Rank: 5 / 5 (1)
I wonder how much energy is wasted in sending 107 trillion emails.
Janice_Taylor_Gaines
Jan 18, 2011

Rank: 5 / 5 (1)
Amazing stats - for those responsible for Content Management in their org, or for anyone concerned about data security, etc., read a great book, "I.T. WARS" (Google to it). Really good info about policy, plans, and appropriate activity in this electronic world. Author, David Scott, also has a great blog, "The Business-Technology Weave" - can Google to that too. Must reading!! We use parts of the book at work as part of new employee orientation. Really, really, smooths things out. Book is written for Business as well as Tech folks.
Rank 5 /5 (1 vote)
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