

What Email Looked Like in 2009 in Numbers - cnouri
http://www.rackspace.com/email_hosting/blog/2010/02/what-email-looked-like-in-2009-in-numbers/

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furyg3
_Compare that to The United States Postal Service (aka snail mail) that
delivered just over 200 billion total packages in 2008._

Wow. Go USPS.

I'm sorry, but delivering 200 _billion_ physical objects is so much more
impressive than nearly any amount of electrons.

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ugh
While the Email number caused no more than a "meh", I am seriously impressed
by the USPS number.

200 billion is about 650 per American. That's crazy.

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Semiapies
And most of it is the bulk commercial mail that goes straight into the trash
can.

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ugh
Ever heard of spam? :)

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Semiapies
Ever heard of filters?

Oh, wait, I _can't_ filter bulk commercial mail - their fees are the USPS's
bread and butter. I have to take it out of my mailbox, flip through the
flyers, the envelopes that are faked out to look like some sort of official
notice, the credit card offers, etc. etc. etc. and dig for the one or two
items that are actually for me...and then throw the rest away.

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ugh
Yeah, but that’s not really the topic here, right? I guess you lost track.

~~~
Semiapies
Neither is lauding the USPS.

A government program to shovel unwanted ads down the public's throat is not
impressive.

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jff
How many of these emails were of the type "SomeJerk has tagged a photo of you
on Facebook!" or "xXx-linkinpark92-xXx has responded to your comment on
Youtube"?

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forinti
If you take away spam, that still leaves us with 47 billion messages for 1.4
billion users. That's more than 33 per day, which seems a lot to me.

~~~
imack
It actually sounds about right. It will include maillist messages as well as
automated emails. Throw in the fact that mail will likely follow a power law
distribution with a small number of users receiving the bulk of email and it
seems plausible.

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kevindication
So, that means 72.9 trillion spam messages. So sad.

