Deef's Net

I was helping someone try and conquer E-Mail overload yesterday, and at one point he asked me how many E-Mails I get. I actually didn’t know, so I just ran a couple of searches on my logs.

In August, I received 14,273 E-Mails, of which 12,362 went directly to my spam folder. Yes, that’s 86.6% spam. One benefit of having your own server is that you can set up a really good spam filter, so I actually only see a spam or two every few days, and I’m not aware of ever having any false positives in over six years of using this system, except for one catalog E-Mail that I didn’t really want anyway.

That leaves 1,911, the vast majority of which went into my Inbox (I used to filter into folders, but now just have everything go into the one Inbox, and I deal with it right away). 69 got filtered to trash for one reason or another (things I used to read but don’t any more, but didn’t want to unsubscribe for whatever reason). Which works out to be just under 60 per day that wound up in my Inbox.

That said, I was almost completely off of E-Mail for a week, and it was summer, which tends to be slower, so I’m not sure how representative that is of a normal month.

Looking at September, so far, I’ve received 2,375 E-Mails, 1,918 of which were filtered as spam, and 8 of which were filtered to trash. That works out to be nearly 90 E-Mails per day that ended up in my Inbox, and there are three hours left in the day.

Number of E-Mails isn’t a very good measure of how busy a person is, since the number doesn’t convey how much work is involved in a given E-Mail. I happen to get a lot of status E-Mails, which are just read-and-delete, so people who get far fewer E-Mails than me could very well have more work to do to keep up with them. And people who get far more E-Mails may be able to delete more of them without even reading them.

But it’s an interesting number, all the same.

In terms of outgoing mail, I sent 344 messages in August, or a little over 10/day, on average (with a week off — discounting those seven days, it jumps up to between 14 and 15 per day. This month, so far, I’ve sent a little over 20 E-Mails per day. This number has dropped rather significantly since I’m no longer the one sending most of the production-related mail for my business.

Again, there’s no measure there of whether they were twitter-sized or Pauline epistles, but it’s an interesting number to look at.

I think one of the best measurements of how well you’re conquering E-Mail overload is by the size of your Inbox. Ideally, it should be zero, at least every so often (once per day is a common recommendation). This doesn’t measure how busy you are with E-Mail, but it does tell how well you’re keeping up.

For me, I aim for an empty Inbox at least once a week, and am usually able to meet it (I keep track). That means that any E-Mail that comes in will have an answer within a week, even if that means saying “I can’t get to this now, but will get back to you at such-and-such time” and otherwise ending up on my to do list.

Current Inbox size: 10, with the earliest E-Mail received yesterday.