[TChris]

Please.....P2P isn’t half the problem that rampant spammers are.

I haven't read anything that analyzes the bandwidth impact of spam. I wouldn't think that it's all that bad, overall.

All email combined isn't a large percentage of the Internet's traffic. So even if spam is 80% (wild-guess percentage) of all email traffic, it still wouldn't have a huge impact.

P2P is a major bandwidth hog, and it's a long-term one, with hours and days devoted to huge media transfers. EMail is delivered in relatively short bursts.

[Psycho_Bunny]

Do you use P2P? Surprisingly, it’s nowhere near as prevalent as you’d think. If you go through the largest trackers, the first thing that strikes you as odd is how relatively few seeders and leachers there are, even for the most popular torrents.

Spam, on the other hand, is amazingly high….stunning….just my domain rejects an average of 120,000 to 160,000 spams every 24 hours, and I only have 170 mailboxes. On average, I’m rejecting 104 spams a minute…more than one a second. THAT’S overhead.

Sure, the spams are small but they’re relentless, and require more internet resources to process than a steady P2P stream. Spam is the biggest problem on the internet right now, not P2P.

[Proud_texan]

"bandwidth impact of spam"

It's not just email spam that's the problem for me.

About half my web site traffic is either attempts to post spam in a blog/message system or referrer spam trying to get a referral URL listed.

There's no posting without registration so that fails and I don't post referral info so they're not getting anything out of that either.

But it doesn't matter to them, they're using zombie machines, they just keep knocking on the door eating about half of my total bandwidth.

It's my biggest problem. Dependable bandwidth isn't cheap to to pay for and accommodating spam bots frys my bacon pretty good.