How much messaging is that?
Message counts sound enormous and take up almost no space at all. Both facts are worth seeing at once.
1.09 × an emails in a working year
10,000 messages is bigger than 3 of the 6 references on this page.
Reference figures are measurements and are rounded; the unit conversion behind them is exact.
| Reference | Size | Yours ÷ theirs | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| emails you send in a day | 40 messages | 250× | |
| messages you send in a day | 60 messages | 167× | |
| emails in a working year | 9,200 messages | 1.09× | |
| messages in a year | 21,900 messages | 0.457× | |
| emails in a career | 368,000 messages | 1/36.8 | Forty years |
| emails sent worldwide per second | 4,600,000 messages | 1/460 |
Worth knowing
- The world sends about 360 billion emails a day — roughly 4.6 million a second — of which a large majority is automated or spam.
- A career’s worth of your own email, as plain text, would fit in about 700 MB. The attachments are another matter entirely.
Frequently asked
How many emails does the average person send?
Around 40 a day at work and far fewer personally. The receiving figure is roughly three times higher.
How much space does email take?
The text is trivial — a few kilobytes per message. Mailboxes grow because of attachments and because every reply quotes the entire thread again.