HACKER Q&A
📣 hn39823509

How many non-work emails do you receive on avg per week?


I've always been an inbox-0 person, but until the pandemic I hadn't thought too much about orphaned accounts. But back when this all started and every company that had my email sent the "how we're protecting our customers" blast, it got me interested in not just staying at inbox-0, but trying to stem the amount of mail coming in.

This is unscientific, and obviously depends on activity that triggers transactional emails, but I've probably cut the amount of inbound email I get by about 50%. I would say in an average week I get about 15-30 emails now.

So I'm just curious what the histogram looks like for HN readers. How many emails do you get each week that aren't work-related?


  👤 curiousfab Accepted Answer ✓
On average 300 per day (2100 per week), of which 100 (700/w) are spam, 150 (1050/w) are from various mailing lists, 25 (175/w) are outputs from cron jobs and monitoring systems (one of them contains these figures :) and about 25 (175/w) are personal correspondence of some sort.

procmail and mutt makes this easy to manage.