Is Email Volume Going Up or Down? What the Data Shows

Short answer: email volume is increasing, not decreasing. Worldwide daily email traffic grew from 347.3 billion messages in 2023 to 361.6 billion in 2024, according to the Radicati Group, and its own forecast puts the number at 424.2 billion by 2028.

If you're asking whether email volume is increasing or decreasing because Slack or Microsoft Teams has taken over your team's day, that instinct isn't wrong — it's just measuring a different thing. Chat tools have absorbed the fast, internal back-and-forth that used to clog inboxes. They haven't touched the external, cross-organization, and record-keeping mail that email still owns, and that mail keeps growing.

This post is about that aggregate trend line: the total number of messages the world sends and receives, and what's driving it up. It isn't about how much time any one person spends reading email, which is a separate question with its own separate data — see the fact-check on individual workload if that's what brought you here instead.

Before you start: what counts as email volume#

"Email volume" isn't one number. Researchers measure at least three different things, and mixing them up is where most confident claims about email dying or thriving go wrong.

The first is total messages sent and received worldwide per day — the headline figure Radicati publishes, and the one this post leans on most. The second is messages per mailbox per day, which tells you about individual workload rather than the size of the whole system. The third is the human-authored share, since a growing slice of that total is spam, marketing automation, and machine-generated notifications rather than a person writing to another person.

None of these three numbers move together. Total volume can rise while the human-to-human share falls, and that's roughly what the last decade of data shows.

There's also a scope question underneath all of this: does the figure count consumer webmail alongside business mailboxes, or just one of the two? Radicati's headline numbers are worldwide totals across both. A number that only covers enterprise accounts, or only a single provider's user base, will look different from the global total even in the same year — and a lot of the confusion online comes from comparing a scoped number against a global one without saying so.

How to check the trend yourself#

You don't have to take one blog's word for it. Here's the order that gets you to an honest answer in about ten minutes.

1. 1

   Start with total worldwide volume

   Radicati Group publishes a new multi-year Email Statistics Report most years, with a daily total for the current year and a five-year forecast. It's the closest thing this market has to a standard reference, though the full report — with business-versus-consumer and industry breakouts — is paid; the executive summary carries the headline figures for free.

2. 2

   Separate volume from user count

   Radicati also tracks the number of worldwide email accounts, which grew from over 4.3 billion in 2023 to over 4.4 billion in 2024. Volume can rise simply because more people and more automated systems have an address, not because any one inbox got busier. Check both numbers before concluding anything about your own workload.

3. 3

   Check whether chat tools grew the pie or just took a slice

   Microsoft disclosed that Teams passed 320 million monthly active users in late 2023, up from 300 million earlier that same year. That's real, fast growth in workplace chat. It happened in the same years email volume also grew, which is the strongest evidence that chat added a new channel rather than draining the old one.

4. 4

   Net out the automated and spam share

   Kaspersky's Securelist telemetry put spam at 47.27% of global email traffic in 2024, up from roughly 46.0% the year before. Close to half of everything counted as email volume growth is not a person sending you something to read, which matters if your real question is about human workload rather than raw server traffic.

5. 5

   Weigh the workplace-importance data, not just the traffic count

   Pew Research Center's most recent survey on this specific question found 61% of internet-using American workers called email 'very important' to their job — a figure Pew says hadn't moved since it first asked in 2002. That survey ran in 2014 and hasn't been repeated since at the same scale, so treat it as evidence email's role has been durable, not as a live 2026 number.

Worldwide email volume, 2023–2028#

Laid out year by year, the direction is consistent across both of Radicati's most recent reports, even though the two reports don't overlap in every year they cover.

Where the sources differ#

No single organization tracks every dimension of this question, which is why a post like this leans on three sources instead of one. Here's what each actually measures, and what it can and can't tell you.

What to do when the data and your gut disagree#

If your inbox feels lighter than it did five years ago while the global numbers say volume is climbing, both things can be true at once. Chat tools genuinely removed a category of message — the one-line status check, the quick internal question, the thread that used to need a subject line and a reply-all.

What they didn't remove is the mail that has to cross a company boundary: invoices, contracts, scheduling with someone outside your org, anything that needs a paper trail. That category hasn't shrunk, and automated and marketing mail has grown into a larger share of the total on top of it. Your personal feeling of relief and the global upward trend line are both measuring something real — they're just not measuring the same mail.

Where this gets misleading is treating your own inbox as a stand-in for the whole system. A team that's heavily on Slack will feel like email is dying, because their internal volume genuinely dropped. A support team, a sales team, or anyone doing business with people outside their own company will see the opposite, because none of their volume ever moved to chat in the first place.

The same split shows up by role. An engineer on a Teams-first company can go most of a week without a meaningful external email. A recruiter, an account manager, or a founder fielding vendor and customer mail can't — their job is structurally external, so their volume tracks the rising global total far more closely than it tracks whatever their internal chat tool is doing. If you want to know which camp you're in before trusting either intuition, measuring your own weekly count for a month beats guessing from how busy Slack feels.

A faster way to keep up as the total keeps climbing#

None of this changes what actually lands in your inbox tomorrow. If total volume keeps rising and close to half of it is automated or spam, the leverage move isn't fighting the count — it's triaging faster than the count grows, so the shrinking human-authored share doesn't get lost in the rest.

That's the specific job AI Emaily's assistant does: it reads every message that arrives across your connected accounts, separates what actually needs you from what doesn't, and drafts replies you approve before anything sends. It doesn't reduce global email volume — nobody's product does that — but it keeps your own share of it from feeling like the number in the table above. We build AI Emaily.