What percentage of the Internet Traffic is junk?

Thu May 6 14:41:16 UTC 2004

On Wed, 05 May 2004 16:56:59 EDT, Marshall Eubanks said:

> Look at Table's 6, 7 and 8 - email, for example, is 1/2 %, so even if all email
> is spam, it's not that  big a flow. Unidentified is typically about 30%, but
> most of that is probably file sharing.

Note that this is biased by a very significant factor - we're looking here at
Internet2 traffic *only*, which basically ends up meaning that email isn't seen
unless both the sender *and* recipient are at one of the 200 or so universities
that are members, or one of the 50 or so corporate/associate members.

For starters, if the sender *or* recipient is at a commercial ISP, it won't
have been included in those numbers.

It's basically the same error as monitoring traffic on some of the DoD's
telephone network that connects military bases, and from that concluding that
87% of *all* phone calls involve military matters.  You'd get different numbers
if you monitored the trunks that connect military bases with the outside world,
and still different ones if you measured trunks that connect different parts of
the outside world.

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