Everytime I suggest that it is spam which is driving the bandwidth economy, I get mocked by friends and colleague. But this little stat tells me that I might be right. The December statistics from Brightmail‘s Probe Network show that a record 58% of Internet e-mail was spam, ending 2003 with a streak of four straight months with spam representing over 50% of all Internet e-mail. That is one in two messages, and rising. Imagine, that half of the bandwidth spent on downloading email is spent on those which are evil, and of course spam. Brightmail filtered over 80 billion Internet e-mail messages worldwide in December 2003. Of those messages, approximately 46.4 billion were identified as spam, with the most popular categories including product-related messages (21%), adult content (18%), and financial services (18%).