How much e-mail do you get a day? How much of it is junk mail? I get about 80-100 messages daily, and random sampling (i.e., the day I wrote this) shows that about 25 percent was unsolicited mailings, better known as spam.
That probably isn't too bad. Users of big, free, public accounts, such as Hotmail, Yahoo! and the like, are inundated. A 1999 study showed that over 90 percent of Net users got at least one piece of junk mail each week. I'd love a piece a week.
Spam isn't just a nuisance: It's expensive. A recent European Commission study concluded that spam costs Net users worldwide about $9.4 billion a year when you add up the time it takes to download the mail and delete it while online.