All ISPs should have some way of showing you how much data you have uploaded (sent to the Internet) and download (receive from the Internet). They usually do this by providing this information on their website. Different providers will provide the information in different formats. At a minimum they should show you how much data you have used and how much is remaining of your monthly allocation and a bar graph comparing the number of days of the billing period they have a lapsed compared to the corresponding amount of data

Some will show you how much you have used each day.

The Windows operating system also shows you how much data is being sent and received by your computer. However because it is possible to have multiple computers or devices sharing the one Internet account the sent and received shown in Windows may not be the total amount of data you have used. Also it is possible within a local area network (e.g. Computer connected within a household) to transfer data between the computers of the household which is not Internet Data. Copying or moving files from one computer to another within the one household (local area network) would be an example of this.

To see how much data has been sent and received from your computer, follow this procedure.

Click on start, control panel, networks an Internet, view network status and tasks. A list of the active networks will be displayed. Under the connect or disconnect section to the rights of the word “ connections” will be the type and name of your connection. Click on that name and a window should titled something to the effect “ Network Connections Status” will be displayed.

The bottom part of this window will have a heading “Sent” and another heading “Received”. Under these Headings will be numbers representing the number of bytes that have been sent and received by your computer.

Unlike the ISPs website, you will notice that the Windows reported sent and received data may constantly by changing if you are using data at the time. By making a note of these sent and received figures and comparing them with figures recorded at a later time, you can determine the amount of data you have consumed during that time period. If you know what you're using the data for, it will give you a good indication of your data usage for that particular application.

If you use a client email program it is possible to see the size of the each email that you have received and sent.

In your inbox and sent mail, where you have a list of the mail messages, one of the columns may be the size of the email. If this is not shown by right clicking on the Headings above the emails you may be able to add a new column which indicates that size of the email.

Note: because of the nature of a emails and the way they are transferred across the Internet the amount of data transferred will be more than the size of the email.