The Cost of Spam

The best estimates say that there are fifteen billion spam e-mail messages a day.

According to the US Census Bureau there are nearly 6.5 billion people on this planet. So we get two and a half messages sent every day for everyone there is! If we assume about a billion Internet users, then everyone gets an average of fifteen messages.

Now if every one of these messages takes an average of ten seconds to deal with and this costs just a penny in terms of time and extra hardware and software, then the worldwide cost is about £55 billion in a single year. This estimate is probably on the low side as a lot of spam messages are destructive and cause severe computer problems and hence are much more expensive to fix.

How far would this money go in fixing the world's problems?