I am sure most email users recognize that there is a huge amount of emails which go out every day. The article below will put this amount in a perspective which will probably surprise you.
This is part of the reason I authored a book on Netiquette and why this blog exists. Email is so critical to so many for communication that it is tantamount that it be done well for dozens of reasons.
Good Netiquette to all!
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Ian Baker on Oct 17-2014 from medium.com
I think about email a lot because my company makes
email software. I was talking with a friend yesterday and it got me thinking,
just how much email is there, anyway?
So, I looked. A lot of email, it turns out. Like, a
whole lot. In 2013, humanity sent about 150 billion emails each day. That’s 21
messages received per earthling per day, or 79 each if you only count actual
email users.
Big Numbers
Big numbers are big. After a point, they become so
immense that it’s impossible to have any real, intuitive understanding of what
they mean.
This is a common problem in astronomy. For example,
the sun is 93 million miles away. How far is that? I know how far a mile is
because I know how long it takes to walk one. But a million miles? I’ve never
consciously experienced a million of anything. Numbers like that are impossible
to truly grasp, but we can try to visualize the distance with a little thought
experiment:
At least one unsourced estimate says a person will
travel 3,658,753 miles in their lifetime. My own estimate puts it closer to 6
million. Imagine that you lived your whole life moving in one direction, going
from home to the office to the nightclub to home to the office, like those old
cartoons where a character walks past the same lamp and table over and over again.
You meet some cute person (“goin’ my way?”), and fall in love. Around age 30,
you have a baby. Your child starts traveling with you, by car, train, and
plane, a little closer to the sun each day.
If people reproduce about 1/3 of the way into their
lives, it would take somewhere between 50 and 75 generations for your family to
arrive at the surface of the sun. If you were born in the time of the Roman
Empire, but with a modern life and an average 2014 commute, your descendants
would be arriving about now.
So Much Email!
And, so it is with email. 150 billion is an
impossibly large number, and that’s each day. If you printed one day of
the world’s emails out, the stack of paper would be 10,000 miles high. A month
of them would reach to the moon.
The average email is 75 kilobytes (except spam, which
is about 5k and 69.6% of traffic), which means a day of email traffic is about
4 petabytes.
There’s 2.3 billion email users worldwide, and the
average mailbox stores 8,024 messages. If we assume that most spam gets
deleted, that puts the world’s total volume of stored email at 1,400 petabytes.
Put another way: globally, we store about one year of email history. What can
we compare this to in order to understand it?
Email vs the Web
The web is pretty big, but since it’s public we all
have a sense of its vastness. It’s also hard to define: there’s sites like
CNN.com, Wikipedia, or your favorite Taylor Swift forum, but what about your
company’s intranet, your calendar app, or the configuration page for your fancy
new bathroom scale? Also, with services like Gmail, the web includes most of
the world’s email too.
A good definition of the web might be, “the stuff you
can find by searching it.” Researchers call this the indexed web. Google says
the web contains 30 trillion unique URLs. The average web page contains 96 of
those objects, and is 1.6 megabytes in size. That puts the size of the indexed
web at around 512 petabytes. So, email is about 3x the size of the web.
Remember that number from before? Email traffic is
69.6% spam. If there’s 3x as much as email as there is web, there’s 3x as
much spam as there is email!
But, since spam is small and it tends to be deleted
after about a month, it makes up comparatively little of the total volume of
stored email (around 16PB):
A previous version of this article segmented out
spam, but didn’t account for its size or deletion rate. So, you may see a much
more alarming version of this chart floating around. Sorry about that!
I’m always so impressed with how effective modern spam
filtering infrastructure has become.
Bringing this back to the personal level, it’s
suddenly no surprise that some days, I spend half my time online reading email.
In a sense, that’s okay: the ability to contact exactly the right group of
people whenever I want is like a new superpower, and I shouldn’t take it for
granted. But, I also think that for something that accounts for more than
half of the Internet, email is pretty janky. We don’t collectively spend
nearly enough of our resources making it work better.
I co-founded a company, Threadable, to address exactly this
problem. We’ve chosen a small part of this space, the email discussion group,
and we’re trying to bring it to the standard of usability, utility, and beauty
that the Web has enjoyed for years. Other companies are doing good work in this
area too, like SendWithUs, with their responsive templates, Mailgun’s development
and testing workflow, and services like Litmus and Inbox.
Together, these companies seek to smooth out the complex landscape of clients
and protocols, in much the same way that jQuery revolutionized JavaScript
development. And, we’re beginning to see the next generation of mail-first
apps, like Square’s charming email interface for Square Cash. Still, more is
needed.
Predicting that email is dead, to be supplanted by
(choose one of: Facebook, Twitter, Asana, Yammer, Skype) is like saying apps
are killing websites. The comparison only makes sense when you compare a creaky
old site to a slick new app. Modern email has a lot of advantages over more
proprietary solutions, not the least of which is its ubiquity. When I look at
the numbers above, it seems like fixing email is a way simpler project than
replacing it wholesale.
And really, we’re unlikely to be successful in
replacing email. New communication technologies are accretive. The Internet’s
been huge for a decade, and we still have telephones. When the phone was
introduced, telegrams became largely irrelevant, but they stuck around for
another hundred years. Do you remember the last fax you sent? Because I sure do
(thanks, Anthem Blue Cross!).
Email isn’t dead. It’s just sleeping. Put the coffee
on, because it’s time to wake it up!
=======================================
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In addition to this blog, Netiquette IQ has a website with great assets which are being added to on a regular basis. I have authored the premiere book on Netiquette, “Netiquette IQ - A Comprehensive Guide to Improve, Enhance and Add Power to Your Email". My new book, “You’re Hired! Super Charge Your Email Skills in 60 Minutes. . . And Get That Job!” will be published soon follow by a trilogy of books on Netiquette for young people. You can view my profile, reviews of the book and content excerpts at:
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