• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, March 8, 2021

Business professionals receive 83.6 emails per day, or 66.4 if weekends and holidays are included in the average, according to Email Productivity Benchmark Report February 2121, a study by EmailAnalytics, a web analytics app.

Included are 2.6 spam emails per day, or 2.3 when weekends and holidays are thrown in. 

The biggest email day is Tuesday — that’s when 87.1 messages are received. Next is Wednesday (86.1), followed by Monday (85.3) and Thursday (85.2). 

The slowest weekday is Friday, when 74.5 emails hit the inbox. Then there’s the weekend: Saturday sees 20 emails arrive and Sunday sees 19.3.

On the other side of this,  the average person sends 34.3 emails per workday, with 3.7 in response to a received email. 

As with incoming mail, the biggest weekday is Tuesday, when the average person sends 36.2 emails. Wednesday is next with 35.4, and Friday is last with 31.2%.

On Saturdays, the average person sends 5.2 emails and on Sundays, the total is 6.5. 

The average response time during work hours is three hours, 38 minutes and 31 seconds. 

The fastest response time occurs on Friday: three hours, 28 minutes and six minutes and 43 seconds. 

Things slow down on weekends — on Saturday, the response time is nine hours, 22 minutes and 38 seconds, and on Sundays it is seven hours, 51 minutes and 24 seconds. 

Overall, the average time to receive a response is eleven hours and one minute.

As for time of day, things start ramping up around 6 a.m., with a pre-lunch peak around 10. Things slow down during the lunch hour and then peak around 2 p.m. 

These findings are based on a random, anonymized sample of data for 565 EmailAnalytics customers in February The firm captures all email activity within users’ Gmail and Google Workspace accounts.  

It’s not clear how many are marketing emails, although the company does see them, says Jayson DeMers, CEO of Email Analytics.  

How does the company define spam?

“We define spam the exact way Gmail does -- if Gmail labels the message as "spam" then we count it as spam,” DeMers says. “Essentially, we use Gmail's labels to determine if it's spam or not.”