Emails are things that most of us who are online just cannot avoid. If you have an online presence, you will send and receive messages with other people online.

Email is the most versatile and practical form of communication on the internet.

Email has gone through a fair degree of evolution over the years and today email comes in different forms and formats there are several email providers to choose from.

You can also use email platforms that automate your emails.

Such email software helps you to send, receive, and reply emails automatically. It also allows you to send bulk emails at overwhelmingly-high speeds.

Key Statistics

  • The average person will receive 121 emails per day.
  • The number of emails includes personal emails, work, spam, social, and promotional emails.
  • In 2020, Kaspersky Lab estimated that 47.3% of email traffic is comprised of spam messages.
  • Over 3.4 billion emails of the total emails sent daily are fake, like email attacks, phishing, and so on.
  • In 2017, out of all email messages sent across the world, 5% were suspicious and 1.2% were confirmed to contain malicious content.

The Benefits of Email

Some people are not net-savvy which today is the minority of people who cannot look towards receiving emails.

With the huge number of people online today it is reasonable to say that most of the world receives emails in some form or the other and benefits from it in some way or the other.

If you are into digital marketing email can prove to be an effective tool to help you execute your digital marketing strategies.

You can reach out to your customers and apply marketing techniques to woo them. If executed properly your email marketing campaigns can get you the best return on investment (ROI).

The number of emails sent per day is increasing exponentially. You may wonder how many emails does the average person receive per day. Many factors determine this.

As the number of users increases daily, it may not be possible to come up with a precise figure as there is no absolute value that you can freeze on.

The best way to estimate the number of emails a person receives per day is by taking the number of emails they receive at a particular point in time and projecting the number across a fixed time period.

How Many Emails Does the Average Person Receive per Day in 2024?

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Using this projection approach, the number of emails were taken and a projection was made as follows:

Towards the end of 2019, the number of email users was estimated at 3 billion and a straight line was created to project growth of 3% per year until 2022.

But by 2020 the total number of emails sent per day stood at 306.4 billion. It seems that the projected growth rate of 3% per year of emails was quite conservative if you look at the figures given below:

From 306.4 billion in 2020, the number of emails sent per day increased to 319.6 billion in 2021. The corresponding percentage increase in email between the two years is 4.3%

Taking this projection through to the next 3 years by 2025 the number of emails being sent per day should be 376.4 billion.

However, even this projection is a rough estimate because we are looking at the percentage increasing yearly, and it is not a uniform increase.

So, who knows?

The 4% odd yearly increase may more than double in the years to come, making the final figure of the average number of emails received per day much higher than the 376.4 billion emails according to the current projections.

But these are the macro figures of the total number of emails being sent per day worldwide. What we want to know is the average number of emails per day.

If we divide the total number of emails being received per day and divide it by the number of users being considered, we can get the average number per user per day.

Many organizations and individuals have endeavored to measure this to find out an exact figure.

However, the final figure tends to vary depending on the methodology and the demographic factors that these organizations and individuals used.

Looking at the various surveys carried out, a ballpark figure for a person who works out of an office or a regular email account daily was estimated.

That person would receive perhaps over 100 emails a day.

One of the most popular figures was 121.

But this figure could vary considerably depending on how active subscribers were using email for personal work and a host of other variables that are really beyond the scope of our discussion here.

The Structure of Your Email Page

Various email providers format their email pages differently. To generalize the concept for a better understanding, let’s consider how Gmail, used by the majority of internet users is formatted.

You can use the same approach to count the number of emails for other providers:

Primary Folder

This is where you receive all emails from known and unknown contacts. But mostly you receive emails from senders who you already have in your email address book.

Social Folder

Here you receive email messages linked to the social media platforms that you are registered with. It’s a useful way of connecting with your social community on the internet.

But you may not want to respond to many of the messages as they can be from unknown and untrusted sources.

Promotions Folders

Offers, deals, discounts, and other such related content appear in this folder.

Many of the email messages you receive in your promotions folders border on spam, but many of the messages get generated based on your user profile and browsing history.

For example, if you recently bought a vacuum cleaner, you may receive offers in your promotions folder for buying vacuum cleaner spares at discounted prices.

Spam Folder

This folder is more like a sub-folder because it doesn’t appear on your main email page. But if you scroll down on the top left menu, you’ll see a heading entitled “spam.”

Clicking on it will open your spam folder.

It’s a good practice to check your spam folder occasionally because Gmail sometimes filters off legitimate messages into your spam folder.

If someone insists that they’ve sent you an email but you can’t find it in your primary inbox, you might find it in your spam folder.

More About Spam

You may have noticed that the number of spam emails that you receive daily has reduced significantly. This is thanks to the default filters placed by email providers.

You can also add extra filters to reduce the amount of spam that you receive daily.

So, in a manner of speaking, you would be adding these spam emails to the total number of emails you receive in a day but this does not come into the official figure since these emails are blocked from coming into your primary email inbox.

How to Count the Number of Emails You Receive

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With regards to all we have discussed above, you can well imagine that it’s rather difficult to count the number of emails received.

We tend to consider only the emails that you receive in your primary inbox. But it goes deeper than this.

You have to consider the number of promotional emails as well. Promotional emails for instance are not like your personal or official emails.

Here, you receive promotions and offers, perhaps generated according to your browsing habits, and these messages appear in another folder.

For example, if you have been looking for a new monitor for your PC, you might be suddenly flooded by emails featuring offers on computer monitors.

These emails will mostly go into your promotional emails folder, although a few may find their way into your primary email inbox.

Then there is your social email folder which in a way of speaking links your Gmail account to your social media platforms.

Conclusion

If you want to know how many emails does the average person receive per day, the short answer is over 100 official emails excluding personal emails.

But this is only a figure based on certain assumptions. We can safely assume that the number of emails that people receive daily is increasing exponentially.

Sending and receiving emails has become a part of our daily lives.

So, regardless of the number of emails that the average person receives, we will see this number increasing over the years.