How many emails are sent worldwide each day?

How to get close to this number

Multiply users by messages. Several billion people have an email address, and the explanation gives the per-person figure: around forty-five a day each. That number sounds high until you remember it counts everything automated — receipts, notifications, newsletters and machine-generated mail — alongside anything a human typed.

The spam share is what inflates the total beyond intuition. More than half the volume is unwanted mail that filters catch before anyone sees it, so the number of messages sent and the number of messages read differ enormously. Any traffic statistic measured at the sender rather than the reader will be dominated by whatever is cheapest to send.

The durability point in the explanation is the interesting one. Email has been declared dying for thirty years and its volume grows every year, because it is the only messaging system that is federated, addressable without a shared platform, and usable as an identity. Predictions about technology dying consistently underrate protocols that everything else has to interoperate with.