How many emails are sent every day?
Around 360 billion emails are sent each day, and well over half of them are spam — filters catch most of it, so the figure a user experiences bears no relation to the traffic. Business email is a minority of the volume but nearly all of the value. The average office worker receives roughly 120 emails a day and sends about 40. Despite thirty years of predictions that messaging apps would kill it, email volume grows a few percent a year.
How the figure is arrived at
Extrapolated from mailbox counts rather than counted. Take the number of active email accounts worldwide — around 4.5 billion — multiply by measured send and receive rates from a sample of corporate and consumer providers, and adjust for accounts that are dormant. Spam is measured separately at the network level by security vendors.
How confident it is
- Low estimate
- 300,000,000,000
- High estimate
- 400,000,000,000
- Spread
- 1.3× between the bounds
Other every day counts
- How many babies are born each day? about 360,000 — roughly four every second
- How many people die each day? about 170,000 — roughly two every second
- How many Google searches are made every day? roughly 8.5 billion — about 100,000 a second
- How many times does your heart beat in a lifetime? about 2.5 billion
- How many cups of coffee are drunk every day? roughly 2.5 billion
- How many photos are taken every day? roughly 5 billion a day — about 2 trillion a year
- How many steps do you take in a lifetime? roughly 150 million — about 110,000 km
- How many hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute? 500 hours a minute — about 720,000 hours a day
- How many pizzas are sold every day? somewhere between 3 and 8 million a day in the United States
- How many words do we speak a day? about 16,000
- How many breaths do you take in a lifetime? about 600 million
- How many messages are sent every day? about 100 billion on WhatsApp alone
Common questions
- How many emails are sent every day?
- about 360 billion
- How is that estimated?
- Extrapolated from mailbox counts rather than counted. Take the number of active email accounts worldwide — around 4.5 billion — multiply by measured send and receive rates from a sample of corporate and consumer providers, and adjust for accounts that are dormant. Spam is measured separately at the network level by security vendors.
Related pages
- How many babies are born each day? about 360,000 — roughly four every second
- How many people die each day? about 170,000 — roughly two every second
- How many Google searches are made every day? roughly 8.5 billion — about 100,000 a second
- How many times does your heart beat in a lifetime? about 2.5 billion
- How many cups of coffee are drunk every day? roughly 2.5 billion
- How many photos are taken every day? roughly 5 billion a day — about 2 trillion a year
- How many steps do you take in a lifetime? roughly 150 million — about 110,000 km
- How many hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute? 500 hours a minute — about 720,000 hours a day
- How many people are there in the world? Living things and the natural world
- How many stars are there in the universe? Space and the universe
- How many countries are there in the world? Things people built
- How many bones are in the human body? The human body
- How many grains of sand are there on Earth? Living things and the natural world
- How many ants are there in the world? Living things and the natural world
Sources
- Typical range compiled from manufacturer specifications — At One Place