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`_







.. _responsetime.pl.gz: /unblog/static/attachments/2003-07-17-responsetime.pl.gz


.. |email-response-times.png| image:: /unblog/static/attachments/2003-07-17-email-response-times.png


.. date: 1058418000
.. tags: perl,ideas-built,software