As more and more business open new support channels, for instance Facebook, WhatsApp and others, does this mean theres less of commercial emails? And does this include B2B emails or just the B2C sector?

I’ve never been a person who receives a lot of mails. I receive my fare share, but far from the worst case.
As a sign of good organisational skill, and success of myself, I’ve had my email Inbox. The less mail, and especially the less unread mail, the better. I for instance always had really hard time to permanently delete emails which in itself has resulted that most of my emails get stored in data files. Meaning .pst files for Outlook and later on now under labels in Gmail. Many have asked me, if I truly need them or not when they seen my folder/subfolder structure. Most often the reply from me is: “no, I very rarely need them. BUT, if I delete a mail, I find myself needing that deleted mail one week later.”

Many companies aim to minimise the sending of emails both internally and externally, trying to transfer messages and communication into chat and other collaboration systems. This, and the new support and advertise channels mentioned earlier should result in less email, yes?
Well, that does not seem to be the case. According to statista.com, the amount has increased year by year, with 2020 with an estimated 306.4 billion emails sent. The estimation for 2024 is 361,9 billion mails.

Comparing that to the 269 billion in 2017, one can conclude the growth is big and continuous.

As I was looking thru my business email since start of April 2016, I have gathered 28 930 mails, of wich you can deduct chats and my sent mails, resulting to 20 884 mails received. That ends up to only 4 177 / year, and that resulting in 3,5 / work day, so really not a lot.

But still there seems to be a lot of work for me to keep my desired level of empty and ready inbox. But today I got to see this wonderful and joyful sight:

If you want, you can navigate to your Google account:
–> Manage your Google Account
–> Data & personalisation
–> scroll down a bit to Google Dashboards
–> and there you will find your Gmail conversation statistic.

So one does wonder, will there ever be a day, when the sent email graph is going down, if yes, what would be the reason for the change. Some I work with on a daily basis have a very different view on emails. Some explains that when all mails are in the Inbox folder, the search function works better. Others have a one or two days a year, when they clean up trash from their inboxes. But viewing a mailbox like the smaller picture, I see nightmares.

And those 11 619 mails are unread…UNREAD! 😳

That is not a made up picture, that is a true screen capture of a live email box. So with my modest 3,5 mails / day, the answer is yes, one can have it empty, but for the one with over 11 thousand mail unread, it’s not without a major purge of mails. As a explanation, or defense, the majority of my work mails go to a team shared email address, which in it’s turn forward them to an case management system, where we are 3 persons going thru them, and managing them to case resolved.

What I do wish for, both privately as well as professionally is that email amounts would start to come down. Advertisement and customer acquisition should be perform in other ways then plain email, and every business should reflect on the necessary amount of sending mail. How this could be done, THAT is the million dollar question.

But how many mails would you estimate, of receiving during per day? And how many unread mails do you have at the moment?