Email Statistics 2026: Volume, Time Lost, and Overload
About 392.5 billion emails are sent and received per day worldwide in 2026, up from 376.4 billion in 2025, and 4.73 billion people use email (The Radicati Group, Email Statistics Report, 2024-2028, 2024). Both 2026 figures are forecasts from that report, which measured 361.6 billion emails a day and 4.48 billion users in 2024. On the receiving end, the average worker gets 117 emails a day (Microsoft, Breaking Down the Infinite Workday, 2025).
Below are the email statistics worth knowing in 2026, each sourced inline with the year noted. Where a figure is old, forecast rather than measured, or comes from a vendor with something to sell, we say so.
How many emails are sent per day worldwide
392.5 billion emails a day is the forecast for 2026, counting business and consumer email sent and received (Radicati, 2024).
361.6 billion emails a day was the 2024 figure, the base year of the same report. The series runs 376.4 billion in 2025, 392.5 billion in 2026 and 408.2 billion in 2027 (Radicati, 2024).
424.2 billion emails a day is the forecast for year-end 2028, with volume growing about 4% a year (Radicati, 2024). Radicati published the report in December 2024 and no newer edition is publicly available, so every year after 2024 is a projection.
How many people use email
4.73 billion people use email worldwide in 2026, a forecast that counts business and consumer users together (Radicati, 2024).
4.48 billion people used email in 2024, which Radicati describes as “over half of the world population.” The forecast is 4.59 billion for 2025 and 4.85 billion for 2027 (Radicati, 2024).
4.97 billion email users is the forecast for the end of 2028, growth of about 3% a year (Radicati, 2024).
How much email lands on one person
117 emails a day reach the average worker, most of them skimmed in under 60 seconds. This is measured Microsoft 365 telemetry, not a survey (Microsoft, 2025).
153 Teams messages per weekday arrive on top of that (Microsoft, 2025).
Every 2 minutes: that is how often employees using Microsoft 365 are interrupted by a meeting, email or notification during core work hours. Microsoft puts the full-day count at 275 interruptions and notes the figure is based on the top 20% of users by volume of pings received (Microsoft, 2025).
Up 7%: mass emails with 20 or more recipients grew 7% in a year, while one-on-one threads fell 5% (Microsoft, 2025).
57% of the average Microsoft 365 user’s time goes to communicating (meetings, email and chat), leaving 43% for creating documents, spreadsheets and presentations (Microsoft Work Trend Index, 2023).
How much time email actually takes
28% of the workweek: “the average interaction worker spends an estimated 28 percent of the workweek managing e-mail” (McKinsey Global Institute, The Social Economy, 2012). It is the canonical figure and it is 14 years old. “Interaction worker” is McKinsey’s term for managers, professionals and salespeople, not every employee.
8.8 hours a week is what the heaviest email users (the top 25%) spend on email, measured from Microsoft 365 activity (Microsoft Work Trend Index, 2023).
Approximately five hours a day is what U.S. adults said they spend checking email: three-plus hours on work email and two-plus hours on personal (Adobe Email Usage Study, 2019). It is a self-reported survey of 1,002 people from 2019, and Adobe sells email marketing software.
64% of people say they struggle with having the time and energy to do their job, and those people are 3.5x more likely to also struggle with innovation and strategic thinking (Microsoft Work Trend Index, 2023).
Email doesn’t stop at 5 p.m.
40% of people who are online at 6 a.m. are reviewing email for the day’s priorities (Microsoft, 2025).
29% of active workers are back in their inboxes by 10 p.m. (Microsoft, 2025).
More than 50 messages are sent or received outside core business hours by the average employee. That count covers chat as well as email (Microsoft, 2025).
Nearly 20% of employees who work on the weekend are checking email before noon on Saturday and Sunday, and over 5% are back in email on Sunday evening (Microsoft, 2025).
How fast people expect a reply
89% of customers have their expectations met by an email response within one hour, and “world-class” service means 15 minutes or less (Toister Performance Solutions, 2018). The survey covered more than 1,200 consumers.
41% of people expect a coworker to answer an email within one hour, from a smaller group of 206 respondents in the same study (Toister, 2018).
How much of the inbox is spam
44.99% of all email sent worldwide in 2025 was spam, down 2.28 percentage points from 2024 (Kaspersky Securelist, Spam and phishing in 2025, 2026). Kaspersky sells security software and the figure comes from its own traffic.
144.7 million malicious email attachments were blocked by Kaspersky in 2025, 19 million more than the year before (Kaspersky, 2026).
Nearly 15 billion unwanted emails are blocked by Gmail every day, and Google says its filters stop more than 99.9% of spam, phishing and malware from reaching inboxes (Google, 2023).
22% of Americans had no unread email at the time they were asked. The median person had 5 unread messages while the average was 500, pulled up by a small group with thousands (YouGov, 2015). It is an 11-year-old poll, so treat it as directional.
How much email is phishing or fraud
191,561 phishing and spoofing complaints reached the FBI in 2025, more than any other crime type (FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center, 2025 IC3 Annual Report, 2026).
$3.05 billion was lost to business email compromise in 2025 across 24,768 complaints, up from $2.77 billion in 2024 (FBI IC3, 2026).
971,181 phishing attacks were recorded in the first quarter of 2026, up 13.8% from 853,244 in the fourth quarter of 2025 (APWG Phishing Activity Trends Report, Q1 2026, 2026).
Where the “121 emails a day” figure comes from
The line “the average worker receives 121 emails a day” traces to Radicati’s 2014 report, and it misreads it. The original says “business users send and receive on average 121 emails a day in 2014”: sent and received combined. The same table splits that into 85 received (10 of them spam) and 36 sent (The Radicati Group, Email Statistics Report, 2014-2018, 2014). So the famous number is 12 years old and overstates what landed in the inbox by about 40%. The current measured figure is Microsoft’s 117 received per day (Microsoft, 2025).
Two more to handle with care. “Checks email every 6 minutes” comes from RescueTime’s analysis of 50,000+ users, and the finding is that the average knowledge worker checks in with communication tools, email and chat together, every 6 minutes (RescueTime, 2018). The same data found 40% of knowledge workers never get more than 30 straight minutes of focused time in a workday.
Open rates are the third. Apple accounted for 62.26% of tracked email opens in July 2026, but Litmus notes that opens from Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection “are not considered reliable opens,” because Apple loads the message whether or not a person reads it (Litmus, 2026). Any open-rate benchmark published since 2021 is inflated by this. Marketing email benchmarks are covered in content marketing statistics and AI marketing statistics.
What an AI assistant takes off the inbox
The credible figures point the same way: 117 emails a day, an interruption every 2 minutes, more than half of tracked work time spent communicating, and customers who expect an answer within the hour. That volume is structural, so more people hand the inbox to an AI assistant that triages incoming mail, drafts and sends replies, and turns messages into booked meetings and updated records. Carly does that across Gmail and Outlook, and Carly connects to thousands of apps. The best AI email tools and best AI inbox management tools roundups compare the options.
FAQ
How many emails are sent per day? About 392.5 billion emails are sent and received per day in the world in 2026, up from 376.4 billion in 2025 and 361.6 billion in 2024. The 2025 and 2026 figures are forecasts (The Radicati Group, 2024).
How many people use email? About 4.73 billion people use email worldwide in 2026, a forecast, up from 4.48 billion in 2024, which was over half of the world population. The forecast for 2028 is 4.97 billion (The Radicati Group, 2024).
How many emails does the average person get per day? The average worker receives 117 emails a day, based on Microsoft 365 telemetry (Microsoft, 2025). The older “121 emails a day” figure is from 2014 and counted sent and received together: 85 received and 36 sent (The Radicati Group, 2014).
How much time do people spend on email? The average interaction worker spends an estimated 28 percent of the workweek managing email (McKinsey Global Institute, 2012). The heaviest 25% of email users spend 8.8 hours a week on it (Microsoft, 2023), and U.S. adults reported approximately five hours a day across work and personal email (Adobe, 2019).
Related: Meeting Statistics 2026 · Productivity Statistics 2026 · Context Switching Statistics · Best AI email tools · Best AI email agents · Cybersecurity Statistics
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