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11,600 emails

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

In 2017 I received 18,000+ emails (not including work). I am happy to report that through a continuous effort to remove myself from mailing lists, I received only 11,641 emails in 2018 (across four email accounts). This trend is clearly moving in the right direction.

I think email is dying, outside of certain dysfunctional corporate environments. Text is now king, and private communications channels within Facebook, twitter, and various other platforms including forums are generating messages beyond count.

That said, I've been even more savage in extracting myself from those platforms, having given up Facebook for good in February and abandoning my twitter habit at some point in the Autumn. I sent 2,364 emails from my personal account in 2017 but "only" 1,716 in 2018. That's still an obscene total amount of email but it's a fall from 6.5/day to just five per day. Looking at my outbox I expect I'll hit about 130 messages this month, which is just above four per day.

Things are moving in the right direction.