How Big is Email?

https://medium.com/@raindrift/how-big-is-email-305bbdb69776

by raindrift • 12 years ago

134 22 12 years ago

ThomPete• 12 years ago

Having someones email is like you being logged into their social network instead of them having to log into yours. You need to handle this relationship carefully.

I am 40 and for that reason I am biased with regards to email as I grew up with it. Having said that. I can't find a much better tool than email to build a social project around.

When I started weekendhacker.net I got 3000 signups in a week. First 10 newsletters with around 100 projects I hand wrote but it allowed me to try out and see if there was something of value without spending too much on servers etc (WH is non-profit).

Now I am at 8000 members and with 500 projects under the wing. I have more automation now but it's still centered around the newsletter and it still feels like a community.

Starting a business around emails is the quickest and most telling way of starting a business next to people actually paying you.

csharpminor• 12 years ago

Enjoyed the read! I'm feeling kind of dumb asking this, but what exactly is Threadable? Is it a standalone email service or a plugin for Gmail? Is it supposed to replace a project management tool like Asana/Basecamp/Trello/etc. or is it a supplement that integrates with them?

fyfer• 12 years ago

I've been using threadable for a while. In how I interact with it, it's a smarter alternative to a Mailman list and/or a more usable and comprehensive alternative to Google Groups (not a plugin). It's basically a standalone email service, and the members of a threadable group have two options: threadable can be a totally invisible layer and the email shows up in their standard inbox as usual. Or they can use the threadable interface, which is a lovely and simple way to see all the threads your group is discussing, split off new topics, create subgroups, and so on. It has many uses for project management, but I haven't interacted with that side of it as much. Perhaps others can comment on that aspect.

neilk• 12 years ago

Well, you know this pattern...

1) people have discussions on a mailing list, and someone has an idea to do something

2) Then you recreate all that information on some project management tool, and tell the participants to subscribe to updates there.

3) the project management tool makes it searchable, taggable, tracks progress, and others don't have to be spammed with your updates. And it probably sends out email every time something changes.

Threadable is like that except there's no step 2.

It's sort of a mailing list manager that can do a lot of tricks with threads and tagging them. You can see all your threads and tasks on the web, or keep on using it via email.

chris_va• 12 years ago

I feel compelled to point out that almost all of those numbers are completely incorrect overestimates.

_asciiker_• 12 years ago

the SPAM percentage does seem overly optimistic...

vacri• 12 years ago

There’s 2.3 billion email users worldwide, and the average mailbox stores 8,024 messages.

versus

150 billion emails each day

These numbers do indeed fail the sniff test. This would mean that the average age of a mailbox would only be ~120 days (150B/2.3B daily mails/user = ~65, 8000/65 user account size/dail user mails= ~120 days). That's a mere four months. Of course, this is only if people aren't regularly deleting mail, but it gives an idea of how far out of whack the estimates are.

Later on, it's mentioned that 70% of mail is spam. Going from that same 150B number, that would mean that the average user would get ~20 emails per day that weren't spam. This is the average user, whose mailbox is only 4 months old, and probably hasn't signed up to all that many services...

raindrift2• 12 years ago

I based my estimates on the best numbers I could find. That said, my spam numbers were in fact incorrect (spam is small and gets deleted). Accounting for that, people save an average of a year's worth of email.

If you look at the growth in email users over time (~6%/year), most accounts are probably > 1 year old. I'd assume the disparity comes from people deleting messages.

thrownaway2424• 12 years ago

Maybe. I feel like the spam number is misleading because OK, maybe the 70% of emails are spam, but spam is smaller than real traffic so it's not 70% of the size of the stored corpus. Also nobody stores spam, they delete it.

eLobato• 12 years ago

Two organizations where I've worked at (1000s of people) managed their own email infrastructure, with their own spam filter.. it ranged from 70% to 75% of incoming emails.

Most spam emails are just a few words of plaintext, I'm surprised too the size of the stored corpus is spam in the same percentage. It seems like a few emails with medium-large attachments would outnumber the spam content which should be in the kbs/email at most.

raindrift2• 12 years ago

These are both excellent points. I've done a bit more digging, and updated the article to reflect them. Thanks!

dang• 12 years ago

It would be better if you felt compelled to explain how they are overestimates.

WhitneyLand• 12 years ago

If spam filtering has become so effective (which seems true), why do people keep sending so much of it?

jewel• 12 years ago

The economics still work out, unfortunately. It's really, really cheap to send spam, so it only takes a small fraction of a percent of people who click for it to work out.

Also, not everyone has the same level of spam filtering as you might be experiencing. Imagine an elderly couple who still pays for AOL, etc. I have been seeing a lot of spam recently about "medicare open enrollment starts soon".

somerandomness• 12 years ago

Spammers actually still make money if the spam lands in the spam folder, because people still look at it.

Also, believe it or not, there are actually people who buy things advertised in the spam folder and get legit product.

eli• 12 years ago

My understanding is it's actually declining as a percent of email sent.

grinich• 12 years ago

This is one of the key reasons we built Inbox, which is a new platform for building apps on top of the massive email system.

https://www.inboxapp.com/

The folks from Threadable are working on great stuff too, and a good example of how you can build a new experience leveraging an existing system.

diafygi• 12 years ago

I'm a bit confused about Inbox. Is it a SaaS or installed program?

coryl• 12 years ago

Email API's for developers.

Sami_Lehtinen• 12 years ago

I'm very curious how do you measure size of web or email systems. Email system is fully distributed as well as web is, not all of the web is publicly accessible and most of email surely is private. Because it's fully distributed system, it's really hard to come up with any numbers which aren't completely random estimates. Of course systems like gmail give you a great starting point, if you have full access to their statistics. But gmail is only a very small tip of the iceberg. I'm running my own personal server, and it seems that I handle about 3000 emails / month. None of it is spam.

lampa• 12 years ago

More visually pleasant email data here: http://www.voogla.com

nexus123• 12 years ago

For me, 70kb on average looks too much to me if I am basing on Gmail’s statistics. Each page of Gmail is 50 individual email threads (that is, not counting the number of replies).

I have a total of 12,592 pages and according to Gmail's usage report, 2GB belongs to Gmail and 1.47GB belongs to Google Drive and Photos. So 2GB/(5012592) is about 3KB per thread?

https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...

Let alone the amount of attachments (some are a couple MB).

And Google said "Attachments sent and received in Gmail as well as your email messages use your storage.” [1]

[1] https://www.google.com/settings/u/1/storage?hl=en

So this number Gmail is showing would be the compressed storage space taken on their side?

How Big is Email?

Related Stories