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How many new Yahoo! e-mail messages have been sent around the world since you began reading this sentence? About 390,000, if you’re looking at this post on a typical workday morning.

And Yahoo! says that it blocks about five spam e-mails for every one valid message that it delivers.

Mail Visualization is a cool tool that gives you a peek into the mind-bogglingly massive data management operation that is Yahoo! Mail. You can learn how much e-mail is delivered through the network (65,000 messages every second, 5.6 billion per day, on average); how many new mail accounts are being opened (275,000 every day); and how Yahoo! Mail continuously analyses user actions in order to hone its ability to spot and intercept spam.

You get to view not just static information but also live data from the world’s e-mail stream. A nice feature is the ability to see the top 10 words used in e-mail subject lines over the preceding five minutes in any region of the world.

What were people is this part of the globe writing about at the very moment that we composed this blog post? Halloween, rose, wallpaper, treats and jobs (or maybe Jobs). And the subject of most of those hundreds of thousands of blocked spam messages? That's right: luxury, watches, replica, ejaculate and Viagra...

Even though its numbers are staggering, Yahoo! is only the world’s no. 2 e-mail service (after Hotmail). It’s been suggested that, as younger people increasingly choose to communicate using text messaging, tweets and BBM, we will begin to see a global decline in the use of e-mail. For right now, though, there seems to be more than plenty enough to go around. 

Check it out: visualize.yahoo.com