Thursday, June 06, 2013

Too many emails

Our synagogue, Congregation Shaare Tefillah, has an email list for members. I've noticed an increase in the number of emails I've been getting over the last few months, so I decided to see how bad it is. I've discovered that the number of emails going out has been increasing exponentially. That means that not only are the numbers of emails going out increasing with time, but the rate of increase is increasing with time, too:

The number of emails going out is doubling just over every four years. In seven years we'll have 200 emails a month (or 6-7 a day). It is worth noting that the month-to-month variation in number of emails is increasing, so even if it looks like "Hey, we had fewer emails in month x", it's entirely likely that the next month will be higher:

I recognize that some of this is due to our rapid growth as a shul. However, our emails per member ratio has also been increasing:


The two curves correspond to an exponential fit to both members and emails (the better fit, IMO) and a linear fit. In both cases the number of emails sent increases at a larger rate than the membership.

I'm sure there's something that can be done about it, but, for now, I just set up an email filter...

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