Email Response Times

I get and send a lot of email. Many of the emails I send are responses to emails I received. When I respond to email I almost always quote the email to which I'm responding, and when I do my email client (mutt) inserts a line like:

On Thu, Jan 02, 2003 at 11:40:25AM -0600, Justin Chapweske wrote:

Knowing the time of the original message and the time of my reply provides enough information to track my response times to email. I used the inbound message ids to make sure only the first reply to an email was counted.

I whipped up a little Perl script to extract some stats and create a histogram. The script and histogram are attached. Here are some of the stats I found:

  • Of the 1888 emails I've sent during calendar 2003 thus far 1128 of them were replies
  • My five most common response times in minutes were:
  • two minutes: 59 times
  • four minutes: 45 times
  • one minute: 44 times
  • three minutes: 41 times
  • seven minutes: 33 times
  • My mean response times was 20.3 hours.
  • My longest response time was 386 days to some guy from whom I want tobuy a domain.

email-response-times.png

responsetime.pl.gz