My Emails This Week At A Glance
Hei Man sparked off an interesting thought in my today: What if I plot all my emails into a graph? How much email do I get, and where are they coming from? So with Excel 2010 and a whole bunch of Gmail search syntaxes (I couldn’t find any applications to do the statistics automatically), I’ve generated some statistics and plotted some graphs for all my emails from last Friday to yesterday. That’s 7 days of my emails!
Note that numbers are based on number of conversations, not the exact number of emails.
Break down of my Inbox
I have 3 Tech65 email accounts and 1 SMU email account coming into my Gmail inbox. I’ve set up quite a number of filters and auto-labels in my gmail for me to quickly identify the source of the emails and which organisations. This graph shows a break down of all the emails I see in my Gmail inbox according to what they were for.
Legend:
- Tech65 related = All Tech65 emails including press releases, internal discussions and viewer/listener questions.
- Arrow related = Emails regarding serving (Interesting fact: Church staff don’t work on Saturdays and Mondays)
- SMU Filtered = SMU emails that are important to me (SIS specific emails, emails from Profs, project group mates and emails directed specifically to me).
- Others = Includes daily devotional, newsletters and social networking feeds, as well as caregroup emails and discussions and those who are not caught by filters
Lesson: I think I should start looking at the non-filtered emails (i.e. newsletters and twitter, facebook emails etc), since there are days where they take up the majority.
Break Down of my email accounts
All my email accounts come into 1 single inbox. This graph shows which email accounts take up the most emails. Note that in this graph, the SMU emails are totally not filtered. If you compare this graph with the previous one, you’ll realise that quite a portion of the emails sent to me skip the inbox. The next graph will show which are the emails that are getting filtered.
SMU Emails breakdown
This is a break down of all the SMU emails that come to my account. In case you’re wondering, only the red section gets to my inbox. The blue section consists of mostly CCA promotions. Note that these emails still get to my account, they just don’t appear in my inbox. So they do collect, and every few days I still go in there, take a quick glance to make sure I don’t miss important emails, and “Mark as read”.
Take away? My filter is working 
If you want to know what kind of filter I use, you’ll have to find me in person. I don’t want the CCAs to find away around my filter.
Summary
So there you have it. A summary of my email. Yes, I get tons of email and I do think I need to filter some more, such as all the social network emails that are good to know, but shouldn’t be in my inbox, as well as the newsletters I’ve been getting. I’m quite surprised the amount I get frankly.
Interesting fact: Emails I received in the time I made this graph (1 hour): 4
Okay, back to work!
Actually, you might want to further split Tech65 related emails to emails from PR companies and internal discussion.
I bet the internal discussion still takes a bigger chunk.
just wanted to say thanks a ton, i found your page while trying to find out how to transfer my smu emails over to my gmail account, and an old cached page on your blog helped me out a ton. i’ve got something like 6000 emails on my smu account that i didn’t want to lose, and since i graduated in december, my account’s going to go offline soon and i really didn’t want to lose any emails.
thank you very much for that detailed and helpful guide. you’re great
Hey daniel, i was trying to contact u about buying of notebooks and i came across this web and this post. Its so fascinating! hahhaha i wonder why you would spend time on this, but its really quite interesting to read :p