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How Big is Email?

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Re: How Big is Email?

#11

Post by thrownaway2424 »

chris_va wrote: post #4

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

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.

Re: How Big is Email?

#12

Post by coryl »

diafygi wrote: post #10
grinich wrote: post #7

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/ 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.

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

Email API's for developers.

Re: How Big is Email?

#13

Post by eLobato »

thrownaway2424 wrote: post #11
chris_va wrote: post #4

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

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.

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.

Re: How Big is Email?

#14

Post by dang »

chris_va wrote: post #4

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

It would be better if you felt compelled to explain how they are overestimates.

Re: How Big is Email?

#15

Post by 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.

Re: How Big is Email?

#17

Post by somerandomness »

WhitneyLand wrote: post #6

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

Spammers actually still make money if the spam lands in the spam folder, because people still look at it.

Also, believe it or not, there are actually people who buy things advertised in the spam folder and get legit product.

Re: How Big is Email?

#18

Post by eli »

WhitneyLand wrote: post #6

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

My understanding is it's actually declining as a percent of email sent.

Re: How Big is Email?

#19

Post by raindrift »

thrownaway2424 wrote: post #11
chris_va wrote: post #4

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

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.

These are both excellent points. I've done a bit more digging, and updated the article to reflect them. Thanks!

Re: How Big is Email?

#20

Post by 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/(5012592) is about 3KB per thread?

https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...

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

So this number Gmail is showing would be the compressed storage space taken on their side?

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