Email to double to 60 billion a day by 2006
According to this story on Earthweb, IDC is predicting that the daily volume of e-mail is expected to double by 2006:
According to IDC, about half of the e-mail that crosses the Internet in 2006 will be person-to-person communications. The rest is comprised of automated mailings, such as stock price alerts or newsletters, or marketing messages -- both wanted and unwanted.
That's potentially another worry, since such automated and sales-related communications now only make up about 33 percent of e-mail volume. As a result, ISPs, enterprises and e-mail providers will have to dedicate more time, effort and money to keeping e-mail as efficient a communications channel as it is now -- potentially purchasing services like anti-spam filtering, or developing such capabilities in-house.
ISPs, which estimate that about 10 to 50 percent of the e-mail currently crossing their networks are unwanted spam, are already staggering under the costly mass of e-mail that crosses their systems. That situation is unlikely to improve when non-personal mailings account for a higher proportion of the Internet's e-mail.
IDC also found that Web-based services are currently -- and are expected to remain -- the predominant means for checking e-mail, particularly for Internet users' non-business accounts. As a result, much of the onus for curbing consumer-targeted spam could fall on portals and e-mail providers like MSN Hotmail.