That's a lot of mail!
Before I dive in to documenting some of the techniques I use to manage it all, I thought a snapshot of a year's worth of email might be interesting.
Last year (2005) my wife and I received 4.5 gigabytes of email in almost half a million email messages.
Yes, that would be a lot of email.
How it breaks down is kind of interesting, as well.
The mail breaks down into three buckets:
- 157,000 messages were to me, specifically. 1.3 gigabytes worth, an average of 430 per day.
- 89,000 messages were directed at my wife. 940 megabytes, 244 per day.
- 231,000 messages were delivered to my "catch-all" - email sent to at an undefined mailbox on one of my mail domains. That's 2.4 gigabytes, and over 630 per day.
Clearly one thing that jumps out is that over half of the incoming email - the catch-all email - is by definition junk of some sort. I use a catch-all for various reasons, but a side effect is that it gets a lot of spam. A lot.
The mail that's directed at both myself and my wife includes all personal mail, mailing lists, mail related to our businesses, requested commercial mail, and, of course, spam. I haven't done an exacting analysis, but I estimate that fully 75% of the email directed at my wife and myself is spam or the result of a virus of some sort.
If you do the math, of that initial 4.5 gigabytes of mail, only a little over half a gigabyte, or around 13%, is valid.
87% junk.
No wonder we're overwhelmed.
The email beast we're trying to tame is huge.
