For the last year I have been keeping every piece of e-mail I received. In total I got 37,122 e-mails between 1.1.2002 and 12.31.2002. Thirty-seven thousand, one-hundred and twenty-two.
Of this total 11,553 were e-mails that I wanted to read. The remaining 25,569 were what I consider to spam. E-mails that were sent to me from people unknown to me that I didn’t want to get. Porn, drugs, credit, mortgages, and various other come ons.
This gives me a signal-to-noise ratio of 45.18%. For each e-mail that I wanted to get I got slightly over 2 that were spam. And the pundits predict that spam is still on the increase. Maybe as much as three times as many spams in just a year or two.
Just for grins, my contribution to the noise level was a mere 370 e-mails sent.