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Eisenstadt's Analysis Of 8 Years' Worth Of Email

Posted by timothy on from the bodyparts-all-fully-expanded dept.

Hylton writes "Thought this might be of interest: Marc Eisenstadt's saved every email he's gotten over the past eight years, including spam, and run an analysis of it."

4 of 230 comments (clear)

  1. GMail by GNUALMAFUERTE · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This is pretty interesting (sadly i can't access TFA)
    Google should have such a program, there should be a preference in you GMail account, where you can allow /deny google to take stats out of your email. Many interesting information can be collected, like, for example, Ammount of SPAM / Legitim E-mail, % of each kind of spam (viagra, drugs, porn, etc), spam by countrys, % of Text / HTML email, and even other interesting stats not e-mail related, for example, language analisys, frequent mispells, toppics of interest by age, etc,etc,etc. I Would gladly allow google to make such stats, it can be done in such a way that no personal / sensitive information would be leaked.

    (Thinks about what has just said, and puts tinfoil hat on)

    ALMAFUERTE

    --
    WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
  2. Raymond Chen's Analysis... by ticklish2day · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Microsoftie Chen's analysis, slashdotted a while ago, has pictures too!

  3. If you think this article is about spam, read end by linuxbaby · · Score: 5, Interesting

    If you think this article is about spam, make sure you read it all the way to the end. It's not.

    He's questioning the entire technology of email as an effective way of communicating.

    Analyzes not just the spam-count in his email, but the work-time needed to respond to the non-spam emails, too.

    This is one of the most thought-provoking articles posted on Slashdot in a long time.

  4. Femto's Law of Email by femto · · Score: 4, Interesting
    I did a similar analysis in 1998. I came to the following conclusion:

    Given enough time, nearly every email becomes irrelevant.

    This 'law' is base based on the fact that of many thousands of emails, there were only about 3 or 4 that I judged to be of value (worth keeping) after three years.

    A corollary:

    You can safely ignore your email and suffer minimal long term consequences.

    Here is an example of the application of "Femto's Law". The boss sends you an email asking you to do something. If you ignore the email, the boss will either a) if it is important come and tell you personally or, b) find someone else to do the task. Ultimately I think the law is based on the fact that email is mainly used for trivial stuff and important stuff will eventually be presented to you in a form which is harder to ignore.

    I guess the applicabililty might have changed since 1998, if email has come to be used for non-trivial stuff, but I reckon it's mostly still true.

    Side note: the reason I ended up doing the analysis is because the 'delete' button stopped working on my mail client and I had to sort my emails when jobs. AT the time I posted my conclusions to the rest of the University department, to other people's amusement.

    PS. No, I'm not brave enough to ignore my email!