How Darwin Managed His Inbox

An anonymous reader wrote to mention an MSNBC article on how Darwin and Einstein managed their inboxes. From the article: "A new study finds that the correspondence of Albert Einstein, as well as that of Charles Darwin, followed patterns similar to modern e-mail communication. Einstein sent more than 14,500 letters. But he received more than 16,200, and responded to only a quarter of them. Darwin mailed more than 7,500 letters. He responded to 32 percent of the roughly 6,530 letters he received."

Comments

What a surprise

[Da Fokka]

"Their timely responses to most letters show that they were both aware of the importance of this intellectual intercourse,"

Of course they were, they are respectively the most important Physicist and Biologist ever. If they had the intelligence to conceive their theories, it should be rather obvious that sorting their mail was not outside the realm of their wit.

Re:Spam

[tomhudson]

They used the cost of postage as a spam filter.

If I could charge spammers the cost of a stamp for each spam I received, I'd be quite happy.

How does this compare?

[Dekortage]

This is just celebrity research. So Darwin and Einstein handled paper mail like we handle electronic mail. Guess what? I handle paper mail that way too. I bet most people do, and pronbably always have. The article doesn't talk about that, however.