Marc Eisenstadt at Corante has been using e-mail since 1972, and has begun an analysis on the last 8 years of it.

I have e-mail archives from back in 1995, but I’ve also deleted a lot of e-mail, especially when I used Yahoo Mail because I didn’t have enough room to store it. I’d like to have e-mails from the past but that’s water under the bridge now. At least going forward with Gmail I don’t have to delete e-mails I would prefer to keep.

The statistics he provides are quite interesting. They show how much spam has grown in the past few years and also shows that based on the rate it’s increasing, he’s no longer going to be able to handle his e-mail in the not-too-distant future.

Perhaps more people will decide to opt out of e-mail (or, should I say email).