Spam, newsletters, work threads and all: roughly how many emails are sent and received worldwide in a single day in the mid 2020s?
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Answer
About 400 billion emails
The first networked email was sent in 1971 by Ray Tomlinson, who also picked the @ sign. He later said he could not remember what that first message said.
How to estimate it
About 4.5 billion people have an email account. A typical inbox receives perhaps 40 messages a day once newsletters, receipts, notifications and work threads are included, and filters silently catch about as many spam messages again: 80 per user. 4.5 billion × 80 = 360 billion emails a day. Industry trackers put the figure at about 400 billion.
Source: The Radicati Group
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