
How Big is Email? - raindrift
https://medium.com/@raindrift/how-big-is-email-305bbdb69776
======
ThomPete
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.

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Sami_Lehtinen
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.

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

~~~
jewel
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".

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nexus123
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/(50
_12592) is about 3KB per thread?

[https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-
instant&ion=1&e...](https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-
instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=2GB%2F\(50*12592\))

_ 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](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?

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csharpminor
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
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.

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

~~~
coryl
Email API's for developers.

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

~~~
thrownaway2424
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
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.

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lampa
More visually pleasant email data here:
[http://www.voogla.com](http://www.voogla.com)

