How Big is Email?
medium.com
medium.com
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.
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".
Also, believe it or not, there are actually people who buy things advertised in the spam folder and get legit product.
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?
1) people have discussions on a mailing list, and someone has an idea to do something
2) Then you recreate all that information on some project management tool, and tell the participants to subscribe to updates there.
3) the project management tool makes it searchable, taggable, tracks progress, and others don't have to be spammed with your updates. And it probably sends out email every time something changes.
Threadable is like that except there's no step 2.
It's sort of a mailing list manager that can do a lot of tricks with threads and tagging them. You can see all your threads and tasks on the web, or keep on using it via email.
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.
versus
150 billion emails each day
These numbers do indeed fail the sniff test. This would mean that the average age of a mailbox would only be ~120 days (150B/2.3B daily mails/user = ~65, 8000/65 user account size/dail user mails= ~120 days). That's a mere four months. Of course, this is only if people aren't regularly deleting mail, but it gives an idea of how far out of whack the estimates are.
Later on, it's mentioned that 70% of mail is spam. Going from that same 150B number, that would mean that the average user would get ~20 emails per day that weren't spam. This is the average user, whose mailbox is only 4 months old, and probably hasn't signed up to all that many services...
If you look at the growth in email users over time (~6%/year), most accounts are probably > 1 year old. I'd assume the disparity comes from people deleting messages.
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.