You've Got (Too Much)
Mail!
Does Anyone Have Too
Little?
By Richard
Dalton
July 12,
1999
Know
anyone who complains that they're not getting enough
e-mail?
According to a study made by my colleagues at the
Institute for the Future in 1998, the average U.S. office
worker gets about 30 e-mails a day. Other observations,
conducted by high-tech companies, show averages of 100
e-mails a day among their employees, with some individuals
getting 200 to 300 messages daily.
The Electronic Messaging Association expects the total
number of messages to exceed 7 trillion by the
millennium, winging their way to almost 400 million
mailboxes worldwide. So what's the problem with that?
Anybody can respond to a few messages, right?
Let's think back a bit. Ten years ago, e-mail was a tiny
blip on the communications radar. Eric Arnum of the
Electronic Mail & Messaging Systems newsletter, who
has better stats on the e-mail market than anyone I know,
said there were only about ten million e-mail boxes ten
years ago. We're not seeing a simple increase in e-mail,
it's a volcanic eruption.
While we're just beginning to experience e-mail's impact,
other forms of communication aren't going away, either. The
same Institute for the Future report I mentioned earlier
also said the average office worker gets about 50 phone
calls, 22 voice mails, 18 pieces of snail mail, and 15 faxes
each day.
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