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the death of email

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

This time last year I recorded a count of the emails I'd received through the year. This year it's down again dramatically. I'm still unsubscribing from things, but I've also been corresponding with far fewer people, and a fair bit of active day to day communication is now happening on IM platforms like Slack and Line.

2017: 18,000+

2018: 11,800

2019: 8,900

2020: 3,790

The rates of decline are:

2018: 34%

2019: 25%

2020: 57%

I wonder if I can get it to below 2,000 in 2021. One thing that I've enjoyed is moving my @werneburg.ca domain to Mailfence in Europe. Highly responsive, error free servers (unlike the Canadian provider I was using) and none of the complications of hosting on gmail.com (as with @emuu.net).

Mind you, I still get 100 emails a day at work, which at 250 work days a year means I'm dealing with 25,000 a year there.