How Many Emails Are Sent per Day?

Every day, you send and receive emails around the clock. From business affairs to marketing campaigns, work messages to personal use, so many interactions rely on email. What started out as a humble messaging system quickly exploded into one of the most popular methods of communication across the globe.  

But have you ever stopped to think about how many emails are sent per day around the world? We scoured the newest credible studies to learn how many emails are sent per day in 2022. Continue reading to find out how big the scale of email is today—the stats will shock you!

Plus, check out the latest data on worldwide email usage, the most popular email providers, and spam email statistics. Finally, since we’re on a mission to create a safer digital world, we’ll leave you with actionable tips to keep your emails safe and secure.  

Key takeaways:  

• An estimated 333.2 billion emails are sent and received per day in 2022.
• That’s 231.4 million emails sent and received per minute and 3.9 million bper second.
• There are an estimated 88.9 billion spam emails sent per day.
• There are approximately 4.2 billion worldwide email users.
• There are around 1.7 email accounts per person.

How emails are used globally?

According to Statista, an estimated 333.2 billion emails are sent and received per day in 2022. That’s expected to increase to 376.4 billion by 2025. That’s a lot of emails!

If there are an estimated 333.2 billion emails sent and received per day in 2022, that works out to around 231.4 million emails sent and received per minute and 3.9 million emails per second.

How many spam emails are sent per day?

Unfortunately, we’re all too familiar with pesky spam emails. According to Statista, in September 2021, the estimated daily spam volume was 88.88 billion spam emails a day.  

On average, that’s 21 spam emails per person per day! No wonder we all keep getting them!

If that’s not jaw-dropping enough, here are even more spam email statistics to get a picture of just how prevalent spam is:

• In 2021, 45.6% of global mail traffic was spam (Securelist)
• The most spam, 24.8%—comes from Russia—followed by Germany (14.1%), the U.S. (10.5%), and China (8.8%) (Securelist)
• The leading variant of malicious spam recorded in 2017 was the Trojan.MalPack, accounting for a relative distribution value of 18.4% (Statista)
• Healthcare-related spam accounted for 39% of total spam volume. (Statista)

That’s millions of people getting annoyed by spam emails filling up their inboxes or spam folders every day.  

But spam emails aren’t the sole source of people’s headaches on any given day. Marketing emails are equally annoying—not to mention when you haven’t opted in to receive them!

How many marketing emails are sent per day?

Marketing emails are also notorious for flooding our inboxes. These include promotional deals, newsletters, product updates, and conference invitations. Though it’s unclear how many marketing emails are sent per day, email marketing is undoubtedly a huge industry worldwide: around 89% of marketers use email as the primary channel for generating leads.  

In 2020, the global email marketing market was valued at $7.5 billion. It was predicted to reach $9.62 billion by 2022.

Check out these additional marketing email statistics below:

• Email marketing generates $42 for every $1 spent (Litmus)
• 35% of marketers send their customers between three and five emails every week (Not Another State of Marketing)
• 51% of U.S. consumers want to be contacted by brands via email (Statista)
• Email marketing is mostly used for lead generation (85%), sales (84%), lead nurturing (78%), and customer retention (74%) (Content Marketing Institute)
• In June 2021, 65% of marketers reported using email marketing automation. (Statista)

Email marketing remains a core strategy for brands worldwide and will continue to be for years to come.

How many work emails are sent per day?

The Guardian reports that the average office worker sends 40 emails per day. However, the personal number of emails sent will be subject to an industry and position. For example, marketing and sales professionals tend to send more mass emails than other professions.

How many emails does the average person receive per day?

So, what’s the average number of emails received per day at work? An office worker receives an average of 121 emails per day at work, according to Campaign Monitor. Again, this will vary depending on your position and how much your job relies on email.  

How much does the average person check their email?

Harvard Business Review reports that professionals tend to check their emails 15 times a day, or once every 37 minutes.

The same article says that overfilled inboxes waste around 27 minutes of the workday because we have to go back and reread emails to find what we’re looking for.  

To save time, you can always limit checking your email to once an hour, use automated filters, and search for keywords to quickly reference old emails in your inbox.

Outside of work, it’s estimated that 96% of consumers check their emails every day.  

Here are some more stats on when and how people check their emails:

• 76% of U.S. workers check their work emails outside of working hours (Statista)
• Nearly half (48%) of consumers admitted to only going through their work emails when they start working. The rest, just 13%, check their work emails while still in bed, 15% while making their way to work, and 25% while eating breakfast (Adobe)
• People spend 28% of the workday reading and answering emails (McKinsey & Company)
• In one study, limiting people to checking their email only three times a day significantly reduced their stress levels. (Science Direct).

What is the average number of emails in inboxes ?

According to our findings, professionals have over 200 emails in their inboxes. That’s because it’s easy to let the stockpile of emails keep building up without deleting or archiving anything.  

How many people use email worldwide?

There are approximately 4.2 billion worldwide email users in 2022. That’s projected to reach 4.6 billion by 2025.

The number of users doesn’t actually equal the number of email accounts—the number of active email accounts surpassed 5.6 billion in 2019.  

That’s because most people have multiple email accounts. In one 2020 survey, 70% of respondents said they have more than one email account—like one for work and one for personal use.  

Radicati reported that the average number of email accounts per user was 1.75 in 2018. They predicted that by 2022, that number would increase to 1.86 accounts per user.  

Most popular email service providers

The latest data from Litmus shows that Apple has the largest market share of email clients:

• Apple is the most popular email client, with usage at 57.2%
• Gmail comes in second at 29.5%
• Outlook is third at 4.2%.

Here’s a full look at top email service providers’ market share:

Email usage by generation

As of November 2019, millennials are the generation with the highest number of email users.  

A Statista report shows the percentage of each generation of internet users with email:

• Ages 15–24 (Gen Z through some millennials): 90% use email
• Ages 25–44 (millennials through some Gen X): 93.6% use email
• Ages 45–64 (Gen X through some baby boomers): 90.1% use email
• Ages 65+ (baby boomers through Silent Generation): 84.1% use email.

Mobile vs. desktop email usage

According to a study by Litmus, 36.6% of emails opened are on mobile, 40% are on webmail (web-based email like Gmail and Yahoo), and 15.8% are on desktop.  

Plus, 81% of people say they prefer to open emails on their smartphones.

You can see a full breakdown of the most popular mobile, webmail, and desktop emails opened below:

Tips to keep your emails secure

Unfortunately, with so many emails sent out every day, there are bound to be online scams. An estimated 1 in every 99 emails is a phishing email. As we’ve previously mentioned, an estimated 333.2 billion emails are sent and received per day, so that’s a lot of phishing emails going around.

A phishing attack could look like a scammer emailing you pretending to be your bank and encouraging you to click a link to log into your account. The scammer will then swipe your login information and use it to steal from you.  

Since professionals receive an average of 121 emails per day, they’ll receive an average of 1.2 phishing emails per day.  

Here are some quick tips to prevent falling for email phishing schemes:

• Always check the sender’s email address
• Delete emails that seem suspicious or “off”
• Look out for spelling or grammatical errors in the email
• Be wary of generic openings
• Have a variety of passwords
• Always use two-factor authentication
• Don’t click on links in emails that you aren’t familiar with
• Delete email attachments from unknown senders
• Don’t respond to suspicious emails
• Never contact email senders
• Don’t give out your personal information
• Block suspicious email senders
• Stay informed about scamming and phishing techniques.

1. Always check the sender’s email address

If it has random numbers or letters in it, or anything incoherent, chances are it’s a phishing attempt. Also, remember that official businesses or business people don’t use personal email accounts, like Gmail or Yahoo

2. Delete emails that seem suspicious or “off”

Delete emails from suspicious-looking email addresses or those containing messages that don’t make sense. Something else to look out for are addresses that aren’t relevant to the content of the email

3. Look out for spelling or grammatical errors in the email

Scammers are known to send poorly worded and grammatically incorrect emails. However, be careful as some scammers copy and paste official business emails to throw you off

4. Be wary of generic openings

Openings like “Dear customer”, “Dear Sir/Madam,” and “Good day” are all telltale signs that you’ve been contacted by a scammer, unlike the websites you’ve subscribed to or people you know who would address you by name

5. Have a variety of passwords

If the scammer gets ahold of one of your login details, they may try those same credentials on other sites. Use a reliable password manager to generate and manage difficult or unique passwords for all your online accounts. The Keychain Access app is a good one for Mac users

6. Always use two-factor authentication

This is non-negotiable if it’s available for your accounts. Fortunately, many accounts, like Gmail, offer it. Apart from preventing you from falling victim to phishing schemes, two-factor authentication and even multi-factor authentication help to protect you from data breaches.  

7. Don’t click on links in emails that you aren’t familiar with

No matter how legitimate they look, never click on links from strangers and strange emails. Avoid engaging with such emails altogether

8. Delete email attachments from unknown senders

Unless you know the person sending you an email or the email is from an official website or business whose emails you’ve opted in to, don’t open any attachments in emails. In fact, delete them. Along with links, these are also commonly used in phishing attempts and can lead to your private information being compromised. Make a habit of using MacKeeper’s Safe Cleanup tool to check, monitor, and protect your mail attachments as part of the cleaning procedure

9. Don’t respond to suspicious emails

Sometimes we may be tempted to let scammers know that we’re onto them, but it’s not worth sending that email back. If you suspect or are certain that you’ve received a phishing email, the best response is no response. Simply ignore the email sender and move on. They typically don’t follow up anyway as they often send phishing emails in bulk

10. Never contact email senders

A common tactic used by scammers in phishing emails, in addition to links, is providing you with their contact details and asking you to get back to them. Whether it’s a request for an email response, phone call, or any other form of communication, never make the mistake of contacting unknown senders. If they know you they’ll be happy to reach out to you and give you  all the information you need for something important

11. Don’t give out your personal information

This should go without saying, but the whole point of scammers contacting you is to obtain your personal information. That’s why you should never, under any circumstances, provide them with any of your information. Banks would never ask for your personal details via email. In fact, no business would

12. Block suspicious email senders

Although scammers typically don’t follow up on their initial phishing attempts, it’s still worth blocking the sender to ensure they never contact you again

13. Stay informed about scamming and phishing techniques

Scammers are constantly coming up with new tactics to scam you with. So, read up on these regularly—like phishing statistics to be aware of in 2022—to stay on top of new techniques. This will help you to quickly spot a phishing attempt at any given time.

How to protect your email account

We’ve covered how to prevent phishing scams. Now let’s look at how to protect your email account against malware, spam, and other online attacks.

• Use multiple email accounts
• Employ a strong, unique password
• Don’t recycle old passwords
• Remove your email address from risky apps and websites
• Update your apps often
• Use a spam filter.

1. Use multiple email accounts

Choosing your main email for all your online accounts is risky. Create additional email accounts to sign up to less important services, like streaming and social media platforms—depending on how important they’re to you. If you can, create at least two of these and use them interchangeably

2. Employ a strong, unique password

Whatever you do, never the same email account password as you do for other online accounts. Keep it unique, ensuring it’s completely different from any of your other passwords. Use numbers, letters, symbols, and both uppercase and lowercase letters

3. Don’t recycle old passwords

If you’re changing your email password, try to avoid using one you have in the past. If your email address was included in a data dump (it could take months before you’re aware), hackers and scammers might get lucky and get access to your email and, therefore, your personal information. As daunting and challenging as it might be to keep coming up with new and unique passwords, it’s just not worth the risk of not doing so

4. Remove your email address from risky apps and websites

Whether you have to change your sign-in details to your burner email address or delete accounts with some apps and websites altogether, this is a necessary step in protecting your email. If those apps and websites are ever compromised in a data breach, your email address could be exposed and your personal details compromised. A good place to start is getting rid of any apps that aren’t listed on the App Store or on Google Play. Apps that tend to have technical glitches frequently are also not worth the risk. Safely remove unwanted apps with MacKeeper’s Smart Uninstaller within minutes

5. Update your apps often

For the same reasons, ensure you update your apps as much as possible. This will go a long way in preventing the email address you’ve linked from falling victim to any vulnerabilities that bad actors could easily take advantage of.

6. Use a spam filter

Nowadays, most email services provide spam filters to help you get a handle on spam emails. They block email addresses and keywords known to be used by spammers. While you can keep an eye on spam emails, using special filters can be helpful to reduce the amount of work you would need to do.

All in all, be pedantic about checking your emails for anything suspicious. And whatever you do, never respond to suspicious emails—let alone give up any of your details. Keep your emails secure with passwords that are hard to crack and manage them through a reliable password manager of some sort.

More email statistics to sum up

We’ve compiled several more intriguing email statistics below:

• 76% of adults said that due to the COVID-19 outbreak, they had used email or messaging services to communicate with others. (Pew Research Center)
• 21% of sent emails are opened within the first hour of delivery. (GetResponse)
• When asked for the last time they changed their email password, 4 out of 10 people said they did so sometime within the year in 2021. (PC Matic)
• As of 2019, 91.1% of female internet users in the U.S. use email, and 89.4% of male internet users in the U.S. use email. (Statista)
• Gmail has over 1.8 billion active users. (SaaS Scout)

By now, you should have a better picture of the full scope and magnitude of email. Always do your absolute best to keep your email accounts secure.  

Fortunately, there are numerous tools that can help you achieve that, and thereby protect your personal information. This is your ultimate goal, and MacKeeper’s robust suite of essential cybersecurity tools can help you achieve it.

If you’re constantly checking your inbox on a Mac, remember to check out our antivirus protection to secure your computer from online threats.