Latest Email Statistics for 2026: Every Figure Verified to Its Source

People and businesses send about 361.6 billion emails every day on the most recent published count, from The Radicati Group's Email Statistics Report, 2024-2028, which forecasts 424.2 billion a day by 2028. The same report puts worldwide email users at 4.48 billion in 2024, heading for 4.97 billion by 2028. Every statistic on this page is traced to its original publisher, named and dated in the sentence that carries it, and the figures that could not be traced have been removed rather than repeated.

How many emails are sent per day?

The figure of record comes from The Radicati Group, the research firm whose email volume counts most statistics pages quote, usually without saying so. Its Email Statistics Report, 2024-2028, published in December 2024, counts 361.6 billion emails sent and received per day in 2024 and forecasts 424.2 billion by 2028. If you have seen "361 billion emails a day" quoted anywhere, this report is the source.

Older editions of this page quoted the same firm's earlier forecasts in the future tense years after the years had passed; the current edition states the current report, dated, and will move when Radicati publishes the next one.

How many people use email?

The same Radicati report puts worldwide email users at 4.48 billion in 2024, rising to 4.97 billion by 2028. That is more than half of everyone alive, and it is the number that explains why email outlasts every tool announced as its replacement: no other work channel has anything close to universal reach.

Which email services do people actually use?

Google last published a Gmail user count in 2019: 1.5 billion users, stated on Google's own blog, and the company has not updated the number since, which means every larger Gmail figure in circulation is an estimate rather than a Google statement.

Google's Workspace suite is counted more recently: over 3 billion users and more than 13 million customers, per Google's own announcement in April 2026.

What is measured monthly is how people open email: Litmus's Email Client Market Share report, calculated from over 1 billion opens in Litmus Email Analytics in May 2026, puts Apple environments at 64.66 percent of opens, Gmail at 24.11 percent, Outlook at 6.49 percent, and Yahoo Mail at 2.57 percent.

Those are shares of opens within one vendor's tracking dataset, not shares of accounts, a distinction stated here because it is exactly the kind that gets lost when the figure is re-quoted.

Email at work: volume, time, and habits

The best-pinned workplace figures come from a OnePoll survey of 8,000 workers commissioned by Slack in 2023: people handle roughly 112 emails a week and spend about 10 hours and 47 minutes of it writing, a load with measurable effects of its own.

The famous alternative, 126 emails per business user per day, is a Radicati figure that lives only in the firm's paid report, so this page no longer carries it; the removed-statistics section explains. The habit itself is measured more recently: ZeroBounce's 2025 survey found 93 percent of people check email daily.

Earlier editions of this page put daily checking at 99 percent from a 2017 DMA tracker; the newer figure is lower, better sourced, and the drift is worth noticing, because habit statistics move and most pages never update them.

The classic time figure is older and original: McKinsey Global Institute's 2012 study put email at 28 percent of the average interaction worker's week, a 2012 figure cited here because it is the original study that everything else quotes, usually without its date.

Email fraud statistics

The most quoted email security statistic is a lesson in why sources matter. In 2019, the authentication firm Valimail published an analysis finding at least 3.4 billion fake emails sent every day; that number still circulates as current, but Valimail itself revised it to 3 billion a day in its Spring 2021 report, and the revised, dated figure is the one this page carries.

The financial scale has its own primary: the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center recorded $3.04 billion in reported business email compromise losses in 2025, up from $2.77 billion the year before, inside $20.9 billion of total reported cybercrime losses, up 26 percent in a year.

Phishing and spam statistics

Phishing volume is tracked quarterly by the Anti-Phishing Working Group, whose Q1 2026 report counted 971,181 phishing attacks, up 13.8 percent on the previous quarter, targeting 766 brands, with telecommunications the most-impersonated sector at 33 percent of attacks.

On the defense side, Google's own published figures are real but old, and their age is stated here because Google has not updated them: more than 100 million harmful emails blocked daily, published in 2021, and 99.9 percent spam-detection accuracy, published in 2017.

The "15 billion spam emails a day" figure widely attributed to Google appears on no Google page this site can find, so it does not appear on this one.

Email marketing statistics: what survives verification

Most marketing statistics failed the sourcing test this page now applies, so what remains is small and dated on purpose. Email's return on investment runs between 10:1 and 36:1 for most companies, on Litmus's 2025 published figure; the flat "$36 for every $1" version that circulates is an undated simplification of the same research, so the dated range is what this page carries.

Mailchimp's own study of roughly 11,000 segmented campaigns, published in 2017 and not updated since, measured segmented sends at 14.31 percent more opens, 10.64 percent more unique opens, 100.95 percent more clicks, and 4.65 percent fewer bounces than unsegmented ones. A previous edition of this page claimed an 82 percent segmentation lift; that number is actually Mailchimp's welcome-email open rate, a different metric entirely.

These figures are old enough to read as the best published evidence rather than this year's numbers, and this page says so instead of hiding the dates.

The statistics we removed, and why

This page used to carry more than thirty statistics. Most are gone, for one of three reasons. Some have no findable origin: the claim that 47 percent of recipients open email based on the subject line alone is attributed by different aggregators to four different companies, none of which verifiably published it.

Some are circular: the claim that people spend 28 minutes a day on Gmail traces, through the sites that quote it, back to this website, and the claim that North America holds 38 percent of email users now ranks this very page as its top source. A statistic whose citation trail leads back to the page you are reading is not a statistic, so both are retired here, on the record.

The most famous casualty is the claim that the average business user sends and receives 126 emails a day: it is a real Radicati figure, but it is published only inside the firm's paid report, and a page that promises verifiable sources cannot cite a document its readers cannot open.

And some were simply off topic for a statistics page: send-time tips and subject-line tactics belong to marketing guides, not to a reference page, and pretending vendor send-data describes the whole of email fails the sourcing standard everything else here now meets.

How these figures are verified

Every statistic on this page names its original publisher and the date of the figure in the sentence that carries it. Aggregator citations, secondary re-reports, and bulk source lists are not used. Where a publisher's site is no longer reachable on the live web, the citation points to an archived copy of the original publication. Figures were last verified on July 28, 2026, and this page is re-verified when its publishers release new editions, with corrections recorded rather than silently overwritten.

Industry averages are context, not insight: the statistics that actually change how a team works are its own. If your team runs on Gmail, Drag's reporting and analytics measure your real volumes, response times, and workload in the shared inbox the work already lives in, which beats benchmarking against 4.48 billion strangers.

Email statistics FAQs

What is the source of the 361 billion emails per day statistic?

The Radicati Group's Email Statistics Report, 2024-2028, published December 2024. It counts 361.6 billion emails sent and received per day in 2024, forecast to reach 424.2 billion by 2028. Most pages quoting a 361 billion figure are citing this report, directly or through aggregators.

How many people use email worldwide?

4.48 billion people in 2024, per The Radicati Group's Email Statistics Report, 2024-2028, forecast to reach 4.97 billion by 2028. Radicati's count includes both business and consumer email users.

How many emails does the average person receive at work?

The best openly published figure is from a OnePoll survey of 8,000 workers commissioned by Slack in 2023: roughly 112 emails a week, with about 10 hours 47 minutes spent writing them. The widely quoted 126-per-day figure is real Radicati research but appears only in a paid report, so it cannot be independently verified.

Is email dying?

No, by every published measure: users and volume are both forecast to grow through 2028 on Radicati's figures, and ZeroBounce's 2025 survey found 93 percent of people still check email daily. Channels announced as email's replacement keep becoming additional channels instead.