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Mail statistics

Posted: Wed Apr 06, 2005 4:59 pm
by Calimero
MOD's and ADMIN's - if this is in-appropriate to ask - do block this post, else I would realy like to do this rough statistics.



Ok, here's the problem:

I want to make some web-mail application / portal thingy.

Everithing I did and plan to do is easily calculated in term of storage space in the DB and bandwith needed.

Well all exept mail module.


I come from a country where still majority users connect trough dial-up ( phone central is usualy from second world war - germans installed it !!!, and a great number of telephone users are doubles, triples... ( on one line they put 2 - 5 households :evil: ) - WHY because national telecomm has the absolute monopoly for the last 10 or more years.


This leads to the usage of mail-ing to be veeery limited - so any statistics from here would not represent the picture from the Europe(EU), North America, Japan/China...


The pool is above and still any comments are welcome on the following:

1) How large mailbox you use and realy need ( ok google realy goes to the nonsence limits ),
2) How many emails do you exchange daily
3) How large you average mail is ( just text or attachement 1, 2, 5, 10, 100 MB :) )
4) What is the purpose - business or private or ( No need to answer this one if cut's in your privacy)
5) Which country ( again not necesary )
6) If possible categorize: computer addicted or pure neccesity ( if you speak for someone else's who's work is not primarily connected to computers )

7) Are you mailing stats constant for each day or do they vary and if possible how often and how much.

The purpose of this questionare is not to take your email adresses - so do not post them.

The idea is just for me to get some grasp on how it is done in the white world, and others who need this info can freely use it.

Notes:
- If you have links to any statistical data on-line ( that does not to be paid for ) do link it
- Already searched many self-called "The best" services - but got only their marketing data - nothing empirical.


Thanks for any piece of information.

Posted: Thu Apr 07, 2005 11:06 am
by Calimero
Is there no one with some statistics link - I talked to google for hours, but avast, no results.

Posted: Thu Apr 07, 2005 2:44 pm
by timvw
here is the output from my maildir ;) (but i recently deleted allmost all my mails)

Code: Select all

timvw@madoka:/$ du -h $MAIL
4.0K    /home/users/timvw/Maildir/tmp
272K    /home/users/timvw/Maildir/cur
8.0K    /home/users/timvw/Maildir/new
4.0K    /home/users/timvw/Maildir/.spam/tmp
4.0K    /home/users/timvw/Maildir/.spam/new
4.0K    /home/users/timvw/Maildir/.spam/cur
16K     /home/users/timvw/Maildir/.spam
3.3M    /home/users/timvw/Maildir/sent/cur
4.0K    /home/users/timvw/Maildir/sent/new
4.0K    /home/users/timvw/Maildir/sent/tmp
3.3M    /home/users/timvw/Maildir/sent
3.6M    /home/users/timvw/Maildir

...

Posted: Fri Apr 08, 2005 6:47 am
by Calimero
Thanks for the votes ( and data ).

So the basic idea was to distinguish how much an average person needs storage for sending and receiveing mails (daily), because I intended to start some web-mail service and didn't have a clue how big mailbox should I give.

I can't match google's 1GB, and personaly I don't think anyone for plain mailing needs it - it's just for storing and archving - user has his/hers own hard-drive for that.


So any personal oppinion on how big mailbox he/she needs - do reply.


Thanks Ahead !

Posted: Fri Apr 08, 2005 8:33 am
by Chris Corbyn
20 megabytes is a reasonable amount.

I send and receive over 50 (easily) emails in a day and I have just a 20 MB allocation. An email is sent when my inbox reaches 20MB but I get a few days to sort it before an auto-deletion takes place (This is at work).

Hotmail now offer 200MB accounts however!