Out of procrastination, I decided to check my junk mail stats this morning. Since Aug. 1, 2004, I’ve gotten 153,828 e-mails. Out of those, server-side spamassassin caught 52,805 as spam. That’s about one-third spam, two-thirds real mail.
After that, I have Thunderbird’s junk mail filter. Since January 19, 2005, it’s caught 5701 spam. Let’s extrapolate that back to Aug. 1 to get around 8800 spam it would have caught, assuming roughly the same amount goes out every month.
Now my “real” e-mail percentage is down to (153,828 – 52,805 – 8800) / 153,828, or about 60%. But of that, I still have to mark undetected spam as junk so the filter will catch it next time. I’d estimate this is about 10% of the remaining email. Next, let’s consider that I haven’t used Thunderbird solidly for the past year, and take off another 10% for that.
So let’s say around 50% of what I get is real mail, and 50% is spam. Consider this: each day, I get around 360 e-mails. Half of that is spam, so I’m reading 180 real e-mails every day. I’m not on any high-traffic lists anymore, so these are all pretty relevant.
Once I’m done reading, how much of my spare time is left to do actual work?
How’s that compare with other people?
Striving for greatness 