How Big is Email?

Having someones email is like you being logged into their social network instead of them having to log into yours. You need to handle this relationship carefully.<p>I am 40 and for that reason I am biased with regards to email as I grew up with it. Having said that. I can&#x27;t find a much better tool than email to build a social project around.<p>When I started weekendhacker.net I got 3000 signups in a week. First 10 newsletters with around 100 projects I hand wrote but it allowed me to try out and see if there was something of value without spending too much on servers etc (WH is non-profit).<p>Now I am at 8000 members and with 500 projects under the wing. I have more automation now but it&#x27;s still centered around the newsletter and it still feels like a community.<p>Starting a business around emails is the quickest and most telling way of starting a business next to people actually paying you.

I&#x27;m very curious how do you measure size of web or email systems. Email system is fully distributed as well as web is, not all of the web is publicly accessible and most of email surely is private. Because it&#x27;s fully distributed system, it&#x27;s really hard to come up with any numbers which aren&#x27;t completely random estimates. Of course systems like gmail give you a great starting point, if you have full access to their statistics. But gmail is only a very small tip of the iceberg. I&#x27;m running my own personal server, and it seems that I handle about 3000 emails &#x2F; month. None of it is spam.

If spam filtering has become so effective (which seems true), why do people keep sending so much of it?

For me, 70kb on average looks too much to me if I am basing on Gmail’s statistics. Each page of Gmail is 50 individual email threads (that is, not counting the number of replies).<p>I have a total of 12,592 pages and according to Gmail&#x27;s usage report, 2GB belongs to Gmail and 1.47GB belongs to Google Drive and Photos. So 2GB&#x2F;(50<i>12592) is about 3KB per thread?<p><a href="https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&amp;ion=1&amp;espv=2&amp;ie=UTF-8#q=2GB%2F(50*12592)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&amp;ion=1&amp;e...</a><p></i> Let alone the amount of attachments (some are a couple MB).<p>And Google said &quot;Attachments sent and received in Gmail as well as your email messages use your storage.” [1]<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.google.com/settings/u/1/storage?hl=en" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;settings&#x2F;u&#x2F;1&#x2F;storage?hl=en</a><p>So this number Gmail is showing would be the compressed storage space taken on their side?

Enjoyed the read! I&#x27;m feeling kind of dumb asking this, but what exactly is Threadable? Is it a standalone email service or a plugin for Gmail? Is it supposed to replace a project management tool like Asana&#x2F;Basecamp&#x2F;Trello&#x2F;etc. or is it a supplement that integrates with them?

This is one of the key reasons we built Inbox, which is a new platform for building apps on top of the massive email system.<p><a href="https://www.inboxapp.com/" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.inboxapp.com&#x2F;</a><p>The folks from Threadable are working on great stuff too, and a good example of how you can build a new experience leveraging an existing system.

I feel compelled to point out that almost all of those numbers are completely incorrect overestimates.

More visually pleasant email data here: <a href="http://www.voogla.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.voogla.com</a>