Email traffic: a quantitative snapshot.
Richard Clayton · 2007
It is common to think of email as a one-to-one communication medium, but at the ISP level, many email flows are mailing-lists (one-to-many) or forwarded traffic (many-toone). Some anti-spam systems have foundered on misapprehensions as to the nature and importance of these flows. However, although understanding has grown, there are no quantitative studies in the literature as to the relative importance of these different types of email flow. This brief study is a snapshot of the types of email that can be distinguished amongst the 331 million items that arrived at a medium-sized ISP in March 2007, and is intended to provoke the publication of further data, to better illuminate the relative importance of different types of email.