I'll go out on a limb here and make a prediction: By January of 2009, email as we know it will be dead [1]. It will have to be, given these current stats at The Company (which is a small webhosting company):
Table: Amount of spam through our spam firewall Total % Day % Hour % ------------------------------ Blocked 53,632,194 94 47,855 96 2,425 95 Blocked: Virus 17,276 0 0 0 0 0 Quarantined 54 0 0 0 0 0 Allowed: Tagged 658,888 1 177 0 7 0 Allowed 2,807,144 5 1,957 4 119 5 Total Received 57,115,556 100 49,989 100 2,551 100
As a friend said (on a private post—hope he doesn't mind me posting it here):
But really I hope you all, being support and customer care, really know that we, being server ops, are doing everything we can to keep up with the dramatic increase in mail volume internet wide.
Yesterday alone we saw a temporary spike of email volume that was measured at 100Mb (Megabit)/sec for about 2 hours. This is really really hard to keep up with, and has a lot to do with why I am getting out of the webhosting industry all together.
And another friend (not the same as quoted above) is seriously looking for another job away from webhosting as well, although I don't know if it has to do with the email volume or not.