A few years ago, when one of my kids was asked what their dad did for work, they replied, "Sit in the basement and write email."

It's not that far from the truth.

I looked back at my mail server logs for 2008 to see just how much email I did write. For 2008, it turned out that I wrote 19057 unique emails.

Yes, that's an average of about 52 emails a day, and no, that is not a number of individual recipients (one email sent to three people was counted as one email, not three.)

I do send out a lot of patches for review (for -stable trees, and for when patches get sent to Linus for inclusion in the main kernel tree), and I also send out a bunch of "Now that you got a patch into the Linux kernel, we were wondering who you work for", type emails to help lwn.net with their statistic gathering.

But that doesn't justify the numbers overall, I just think I have a bad habit.

Here's a breakdown of emails sent by the time of day for the whole year:

You can pretty clearly see when I go eat dinner and then switch over to using my laptop in the evening (time zone is local time of the day.)

When I tried to graph per day, you can kind of see lower numbers on the weekends if you squint:

I guess it's no wonder that Google thinks my email address is a spam-bot and refuses to let me sign up for any google groups with it. I think it is trying to tell me to cut down on my output or something.

Clearly I need help...

posted Fri, 16 Jan 2009 in [/linux]