Last week one of our Beta Testers from a large corporation sent us a note to discuss their needs for SideFinder and he mentioned the volume of email he receives in one day. I replied back to correct what had to be a typo of as it was a completely unrealistic number of 7000.
It was no typo.
Apparently Jody works as a Systems Administrator and gets a - cough - “lot” of auto-generated email in the form of server trouble tickets on top of the torrent coming from managers, colleagues etc.
None of us here have ever seen or heard of an inbox of this size and we’ve worked at some pretty big companies. In an 8 hour day there are 28,800 seconds which would allow an average of 4.1 seconds to read every message. This is staggering.
If SideFinder can help Jody manage his email, it can help anybody.
If anyone cares to top this story please feel free. Here’s a screenshot of the message count in his inbox in case you think this message contains a typo.
This is not that much. When the automated (in my case, build) system that sends you status emails goes into a broken tight loop, those emails can suddenly go to 100,000+/hr. (yes, that’s 5 zeros)! Even if you catch the problem in the first hour, it may be quite some time before the flood of emails drains from your mail server. This scenario gets worse if the failure is in the middle of the night when no one is watching!
Comment by David Masterson — January 25, 2008 @ 5:18 pm
I thought I had it bad with my inbox. That is insane!
Comment by mark — January 28, 2008 @ 10:19 pm