As everyone knows, I send a lot of email, but it turns out I also get a lot of email as well. Just how much I never really considered until the other day when someone asked, so I figured I'd check.

I took a 24 hour period spanning Wednesday November 10 through Thursday November 11, 2010 as a random sample of what flows my way. This was a fairly normal day, nothing major happening in Linux kernel development land, or at work, so the numbers might a bit low from some other random day where there might be wonderful flamefests going on or lots of work-related questions happening.

Overall, in 24 hours I received 18,799,115 bytes (18Mb) of email in 2067 individual messages:

Total messages	2067
Spam	410
Linux related messages	1655
Non-Linux related messages	2

In looking at the Linux related messages, they broke down in the following manner:

• 59 emails from my "I have applied your patch" bot
• 4 responses to that bot where either I was thanked (1) or complaints that I applied the wrong patch (3)
• 237 emails to mailing lists that I read everything that is posted. This includes a number of openSUSE mailing lists, systemd, linux-usb, linux-pci, linux-hotplug, IP, and a variety of other lower traffic lists.
• 49 emails to internal work related mailing lists
• 97 emails that were work related and automatically generated (bugzilla, obs, git, etc.)
• 844 emails to mailing lists that I filter and just skim as I have time and energy for. This includes linux-kernel, git, ntdev, linux-fsdevel and a few other minor lists.
• 2 emails that were Novell wide and very generic
• 19 work related emails where I was on the To: or Cc:
• 1 mailman list admin message
• 1 lwn.net weekly notificataion
• 29 messages sent by me to lists that I'm on
• 167 duplicates (messages sent to more than one list I'm on, or to me and a list at the same time.)
• 5 bounced email notifications
• 35 kernel patches I was asked to review or apply that were sent publically to a list as well.
• 90 responses to kernel patches I was asked to review or apply by others doing the review.
• 3 private emails about kernel patches sent to me already that I hadn't got to yet.
• 8 private emails from people I know, having something to do with Linux development issues.
• 6 private emails about Linux issues from people that I do not know, that should have been sent to a mailing list instead of just me.

And again, this really felt like a slow day for email, I should do this for a "busy" day sometime again to see just how much larger it really is, or is not.

posted Mon, 10 Jan 2011 in [/linux]