• by Masha Geller , December 12, 2002

According to the latest report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, the average American work emailer on a typical day spends about a half hour handling email. Not only that, the majority of work emailers receive 10 or fewer emails and send five or fewer.

Personally, if on any given day I got only 10 emails it would only mean that our server was broken. I would imagine that everyone in this business would assume the same thing, but that’s because we all fall into the exclusive 20% of all work emailers whom Pew calls “power emailers.” We’re the workers who receive more than 50 messages a day, send more than 20 a day, and spend two or more hours a day on email.

Be that as it may, the importance of this report is in that it shows Spam and inbox clutter in a better light than we’re used to. As Deborah Fallows, the author of the report, put it, “We began this survey expecting to find the beginning of a backlash against email – not just against spam, but also against the rising volume of all kinds of email. Instead, we found that most American workers are pleased with the role email plays in their job, and we found almost zero evidence of disillusionment with email.”

Asked to rate email’s place in their work on a scale of 1-10, 52% ranked it as essential and another 34% viewed it as valuable. Relatively few rated it a waste of time. According to the report, 72% of work emailers say email helps them communicate with more people; 71% of work emailers say email saves them time; 62% say email makes them more available to co-workers; 59% say email improves workplace teamwork; and 43% say email has offered them some relief at times during their workdays.

Fallows noted, though, that this positive assessment applies only to work-related email. Surprisingly, most work emailers told Pew they get little or no spam in their work-related email accounts, but that has little effect on their growing concern about spam in their personal email accounts.