Poll: How many legitimate emails do you receive daily? | Hacker News Reader

Poll: How many legitimate emails do you receive daily?

7 pointsRK10 comments

Just out of pure curiosity, and prompted by the recent submission on sorting through 500 emails, I've made a poll to find out how much legitimate email HN readers are receiving daily.

I'll make an arbitrary definition of legitimate email as anything that you don't mark as spam or delete without reading.

Just make a guess.

View on HN

At least 50.

I'm so famous that there are lots of people in warm countries that want to enter into an enduring business relationship with me. I'm apparently also very handsome, there are tons of women out there that mail me because they've seen my picture somewhere and consider me so absolutely gorgeous they want to start a relationship with me.

It's flattering, to put it mildly. I wished I had time enough to mail them back.

And then there are people that seem to have found out all kinds of medical details about me...

On a more serious note, I receive more email than I can keep up with, every couple of weeks it starts to get on my nerves and I spend a whole day taking care of the backlog.

Note to self: improve email discipline.

Work or personal? I get maybe a half dozen legitimate personal emails on a busy day. I get over a hundred work emails - but there's a blurry distinction between what's "legitimate" on my work e-mail, since I like to stay informed on a lot of code reviews and mailing lists that aren't directly addressed to me.

Emails that I read? Somewhere around 25. Emails that I keep? Over 100.

I'm on several mailing lists (most notably FreeBSD commitmail) where I don't read everything, but still keep emails for future reference.

Oh, and the above doesn't count ~40 cron emails per day, which I usually "read" to the extent of scrolling through them quickly just in case there's something unusual in them.

I average about 50 messsages daily; this covers several OpenBSD lists.

It's a bit much, and not all of them are proper e-mail messages (one-line commit messages...)

I get no more than 10 legit emails a day (both work and personal) and sometimes it feels like no more than 10 legit emails a week. If it's that important, folks know to either call me, IM me, or catch me on Twitter--or risk "Ohh, I didn't see that..."

Funny, I wrote an blog post about this last week.

http://blogs.auckland.ac.nz/z00m/2009/11/24/signal-to-noise/

Not counting mailing lists, mine would be 0-10. With mailing lists, at least a few hundred, since I'm subscribed to LKML and a dozen or two others.

I put 26-50, but I get about 14 unique-sender emails a day, the rest is read-respond-read-respond.

Less than 5 per day. I discourage email at all costs.

Funny. That's what I do with phone.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com