What Email Looked Like in 2009 in Numbers | Hacker News Reader

What Email Looked Like in 2009 in Numbers

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9 pointscnouri12 comments

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.

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.

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

Ever heard of spam? :)

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.

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

Neither is lauding the USPS.

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

I'm not; most of it is spam, just the sort that can't be automatically filtered, that takes much more energy to make and move around, and that eventually goes into landfills.

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"?

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.

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.

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

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