107 trillion emails sent last year: Pingdom

Web monitoring service says internet users send 294 billion email messages per day, 89% of them spam.

WASHINGTON: Internet users sent a total of 107 trillion emails last year, most of them spam, according to a Web monitoring service.

The number of emails sent last year were among the facts and figures about the Internet gathered by Pingdom from various sources and published Thursday on their website.

Pingdom said that as of June 2010, there were 1.97 billion Internet users: 825.1 million in Asia, 475.1 million in Europe, 266.2 million in North America, 204.7 million in Latin America and the Caribbean, 110.9 million in Africa, 63.2 million in the Middle East and 21.3 million in Oceania and Australia.

Pingdom said an average of 294 billion email messages were sent per day and about 89 per cent were spam.

It said there are 2.9 billion email accounts worldwide and 152 million blogs.

The total number of websites is 255 million, Pingdom said, up 21.4 million over the previous year.

It said there were 88.8 million .com domain names, 13.2 million .net domain names, 8.6 million .org domain names and 79.2 million country code domains such as .cn or .uk.

Pingdom also published figures on the growth of Twitter and Facebook.

Twitter added 100 million new accounts last year and had a total of 175 million as of September, Pingdom said, adding that 25 billion messages, or "tweets," were sent in 2010.

Facebook had nearly 600 million users at the end of the year with 250 million joining in 2010.