Day! Hard to believe, isn’t it? Spam eats 512 terabytes of space each and every single day. This is just an extremely rough estimate, and it’s likely that it’s in fact more than 512 terabytes each day. Pingdom came up with this estimate after finding out that there are about 120 billion spam emails that pollute the web each day. Then they sampled the amount of spam that their office mail server got to determine the average size of each message which was 4.27 kilobytes. Multiply 4.27 kilobytes by the 120 billion spam messages each day and you come up with 512 terabytes. If you were to take into consideration the size of the spam messages which are one giant image, the number would likely be quite a bit more. In all, I’d say that their number is on the low side.
So what does this all mean? Well, for starters, that’s a lot of wasted bandwidth, wouldn’t you say? To put this into perspective, one terabyte is equal to 1000 gigabytes. More interesting is that the cost of a one terabyte drive is about $250. If you had enough of these to cover the 512 terabytes that are eaten every day, it comes out to $128,000 worth of hard drive space each day! That helps explain why mail services such as Gmail will automatically delete your spam messages after so many days. Yes, it’s a convenience for their users, but think about how much extra space they’d need to handle millions of spam messages that just sat there and never got deleted.
Pingdom points out a few additional reasons why spam does us no good whatsoever:
- Added strain on the internet’s infrastructure.
- Wasted bandwidth.
- Wasted disk space on mail servers AND workstations.
- AND finally, how many legitimate emails aren’t missed because they disappear in the masses of spam?
This all helps explain why the FBI takes spamming seriously, and why one of the top 10 spammers in the world was recently arrested for conducting his “business.”
Enough of this spam already!…
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$250 is about the cost for standard grade hard-drive. Disk space for enterprise grade drives or SAN is a lot more expensive.
My company recent received a quote for 6 TB and 6 new hardware units at a cost of $105,000. Yes, the blade chassis have connectors for SATA disks they are not recommended for enterprise production environments.
That’s a really good point Cory. That just puts the price tag of spam up even higher.