4 Years of GMail

It's now been exactly 4 years since I opened my GMail account. June 2004, in the height of engagement planning -- followed shortly by planning for our November wedding. In those days you had to either know someone at Google to invite you or pay $50 on EBay for an invitation to get a GMail account. I mentioned in an earlier post that I told Mr. Schmidt that GMail saved my marriage--that's a bit of an exaggeration, but it sure did help with planning a Sacramento wedding while living in San Diego. At that time, GMail's 1 gigabyte of storage was the most beneficial feature as I was constantly sending budget and guest list spreadsheets, my invitation and program designs, and pictures back and forth with Natalie & family.

This Google account has added many useful applications since then. In October 2006 I started this blog using that same Google account. Then Natalie and I started sharing our calendar online so we would actually know what each other are doing -- now I wouldn't know what's going on without it. Then there's Picasa web albums for the cool slideshows and Google Reader lets me know when friends update their blogs.

Over these 4 years I have racked up 16,411 total conversations (no spam of course, gmail doesn't allow that). Of those, I have sent mail in 3,456 conversations so by my guesstimation I've sent an average of 4.73 personal emails per day (assuming 2 sent mails per conversation and one leap year). I am currently using 1.75 GB (25%) of my 6.82 GB of available storage space and have never deleted an email. I still love all kinds of things about GMail, especially the speed, searchability, labels, custom "From:", group chat, conversation view, the April Fool's jokes, and even the targeted ads.

The Radicati Group says that the number of emails sent per day (in 2006) was around 183 billion -- 130 billion of which they say may have been spam and viruses so that leaves 53 billion legitimate emails sent per day. There are approximately 1.2 billion worldwide email users so the average number of emails sent per day per person is 44.17. Even if I add my work emails I'm still ~25% of average. How many personal emails do you send per day?