GROWING POPULARITY OF EMAIL

EMAILS EMERGED AS POPULAR CHOICE FOR WRITTEN COMMUNICATION
The estimates for 2005 by the International Postal Union show that both the letter and parcel traffic put together exceed 444 billion. We can assume that the letter traffic and parcel traffic put together during 2008 might have reached 550 billion annually at the most.
According to a February 2007 article in Tech Crunch estimates there are about 250 million Yahoo! Mail users, followed by 228 million Hotmail users and 51 million Gmail users world wide. Radcati Group Inc estimates email traffic per day in 2009 reach astounding 247 billion per day. Compare this with 550 billion letter and post parcel traffic per year. It just takes 2 days internet traffic to equal to an year’s letter and postal traffic. But out of the estimated 247 billion e mail or internet related traffic per day, 81% or 200 billion email traffic is spam related. Spam can be defined as sending unsolicited, unwanted, irrelevant or inappropriate messages, in the nature of commercial advertising in mass quantities. It can be termed as electronic junk mail. Advertisers of dubious products, get rich schemes or quasi legal services mostly resorts to spam mail as it costs them little. Email spam’s target is individual users with direct mail messages. Even if we take out the 81% spam email, yet the genuine email related traffic approximately 50 billion per day and the e mail traffic compared to the postal traffic is hundreds of times shows that internet emerged as a popular communication medium. There is still a huge scope for the penetration as the estimated email users are only 1.4 billion people though the world population is estimated at 6.7 billion and with the internet devices becoming cheaper the email traffic is bound to grow bigger.
One of the main benefits of email usage is the huge savings of paper and the printing costs. Email is sure environmentally friendly and helps in eco balance.