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     traffic

This page highlights recent statistics about email traffic and demographics. The bigger picture is discussed in the separate Metrics & Statistics guide.

For many people in Australia and overseas the internet still predominantly equals access to unformatted electronic letters. A perspective on email statistics is provided by a 132 page report (PDF) from US specialist eMarketer in 2001.

     location

The August 2001 Gallup Poll reports more than nine in 10 US respondents indicate that email (97%) and the net (96%) have made their lives better. The report is based on an email-only survey of US adults. It claims that the 'typical' user is online for seven to eight hours each week; 37% indicate that they are online for over 10 hours per week. One in eight spends 20 hours or more online each week. David Boyle's The Tyranny of Numbers (London: Flamingo 2001) asserts that the "average American" spends 8 months answering/sending email during a lifetime.

Sending/reading mail continues to be the 'killer app', with 90% of respondents saying they use email at home and 80% at work. 53% use email at both locations and most have more than one email address: only 23% have a single address, 33% have two addresses, 14% have three, 7% have four, and 22% have five or more.

A 2001 survey for Return Path, a US provider of 'change-of-address services', indicates that 74% of respondents owned multiple email addresses, with an average of 2.6 per consumer. Most had specific addresses for any or all of work/school, home, website subscriptions, and a constant address in case they change jobs or schools.

It found that less than one-third of consumers regularly notify sites and newsletters of their address change. 41% of those surveyed had changed an email address at least once in the last two years (15% changed addresses two or more times in that time). Among those consumers who changed addresses, only 37% notified any regularly visited sites of the change. 31% notified businesses that regularly send them email; 24% notified sites where they make regular purchases; and 16% notified discussion lists/groups. 46% of those notifying a change of address did so by email (40% during a recurrent visit to a site).

A March 2001 report from UK business services company Regus warned, unconvincingly, of an email divide in suggesting that that office workers in London and the South rely more on email to communicate with colleagues and clients than their northern and Scottish counterparts.

11% of those in London (and 2% of those in the South) sent 91 to 100 "business-related" emails every day. 27% sent between 11 and 30 business emails in an average day. 25% of Southern office workers sent 11 to 20 messages. Up North 76% of office workers sent less than ten work related emails per day. 20% sent between 11 and 20. Regus claims that during an average day Scots office workers sent no more than ten business related emails

     time

The 2001 ABA Australian Families & Internet Use report, in suggesting that 61% of adults are online and 30% of all Australians are online at home, notes that email is the most used internet service.

52% of respondents in the Gallup study said email is their most common online activity.

51% of those who use email at work check it at least once an hour. Only 5% check it less often than once a day. Most check their email at home either a couple times a day (30%) or about once a day (41%); 22% check it less often. The Return Path survey suggested that 83% of respondents accessed email for business purposes at least once a day; 82% accessed email for personal purposes at least once a day and 53% for school purposes.

A majority of Gallup's users reported less reliance on the phone and snailmail but are unwilling to abandon those media. There's no appreciable gender difference in willingness to part with post or mobile phones. Users are most willing to sacrifice mobile phones (55%) followed by letters (21%), email (16%) and the telephone (7%).

The typical Gallup email user spends 7 to 8 hours online per week (half spend more time online and half spend less). The heaviest users - online 40 hours or more per week - are usually male or below the age of 50.

61% of women said that email messaging was their most frequent online activity, compared to 44% of men. Only 23% of women said searching for information was their most frequent online activity, compared to 39% of Gallup's men.

     volume

Gallup's typical user receives 12 messages at work each day; 28% got 20 or more each day. In contrast, sending mail is less common: the typical user supposedly despatches six messages at work each day. 16% send 20 or more messages per day. At home the typical user receives eight messages each day and sends three, with 11% getting over 20 each day at home and only 1% sending that many from home.

39% reported that coworkers and business associates were their most frequent email respondents, followed by family members (33%) - including children (9%), siblings (9%), significant others (6%) and parents (5%). 28% indicated that they email friends most often.

The Year-End 2000 Mailbox Report from Messaging Online suggests that, globally, there are around 891 million email addresses ("mailboxes"), many with services such as Hotmail. Consumers comprise 60% of email accounts, equivalent to one address for every thirteen people on the planet.

The number of US mailservice subscribers climbed by 73% in 2000. Other parts of the globe experienced 109% growth and the number of wireless messaging devices grew to 31.8 million (excluding a supposed 500 million short message service devices).

Carriage & content behemoth AOL Time Warner headed the global list of ISP mailservices with 11.4% of the 234 million addresses. Microsoft's Hotmail had 30.3% of the 280 million webmail subscribers. China's SinaMail ranked 5th globally with 11.5 million addresses, ahead of Brazil's UOLmail (7 million users).

Newsweek claimed that in 1999 the number of average daily office communications per capita in the US was

Telephone - 52
Email - 54
Voice mail - 23
Snail mail - 18
Fax - 14
Pager - 8
Mobile phone - 4

     spam

Most users in the 2001 Gallup survey said that up to 30% of messages they receive are spam; 39% say they receive more than that, including 18% who say that at least half their email is spam.

42% said they "hate it," 45% said spam is "an annoyance, but do not hate it," while the rest have no strong feelings either way (9%), or sometimes find the information contained in spam useful (4%). Users aged 18 to 29 are much more likely to say they hate spam (67%) than the 30 to 49 age cohort (43%) or over fifties (26%).

The E-mail Overload in Congress: Managing a Communications Crisis study suggests that members of Congress and their staff received around 80 million emails in 2000, with some offices receiving well over a thousand messages a day. The volume of email has risen from around 36 million per year in 1998 to over 80 million messages last year.

     other

The December 2000 Pew Internet Project's report on The holidays online: Emails and e-greetings outpace e-commerce suggests that 53% of the US online population (over 51 million people) sent email during December to relatives and friends to discuss the holidays or make plans. 32% of users sent e-greeting cards. Hispanics were more likely than other groups to have sent e-greeting cards (45% did so) and a gender gap in sending online greeting cards saw 38% of women send cards versus 27% of men. Online women were more active holiday emailers, with 56% having sent an email to family or friends about the holidays, compared to 50% of online men.

     points of reference

In 2001 Australians wrote 450 letters per capita. (The annual figure for the US is 700; for Lebanon it is 4.) The International Postal Union (IPU) suggests that in 1997 the global figure for letters was an average of 71 letters per person: 703 per person in the US, 547 in Norway, 493 in Sweden, under 1 in Angola.

The IPU estimates that in 1998 over 1.1 billion letters were posted each day for delivery within national borders: approximately 420 billion domestic letters. The US had the largest domestic letter traffic (around 197 billion letters in 1998); China had 26 billion domestic letters, Japan and France each had 25 billion, India had 16 billion, Brazil had 5 billion and Cambodia had a mere 37 000.

As of 1998 around 23 million letters crossed national borders each day, with a global figure of 8.5 billion international letters per year. The UK was responsible for the largest number of international letters (968 million letters in 1998), followed by the United States with 644 million letters sent overseas.

Australia Post claimed in 1998 that the total number of letters mailed Australia had increased by 38% since 1960. In that year letters supposedly accounted for "half of all 3 billion messages sent" in Australia; by 1998 letters comprised 19% of the 24 billion messages sent.

Around 45% of US adults owned a mobile phone as of mid-2003, compared to 75% of their EU peers.

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