After 6 months of colleting email data it should be possible to spot trends and variations. Some variations, mostly around holiday periods are quite obvious but trends have not been so obvious. One measure in particular has been remarkably constant: the average number of recipients per email. The following plot shows this average over the last 27 weeks for approximately 2,000 people and 10,000,000 emails:

The average across the entire period is 1.66. The only noticeable variation occurs during the Christmas holiday when the organisation is almost completely closed.

Compare this with a couple of other averages:

That last one, which effectively shows the average size of emails, is interesting in that there is a peak immediately following the end of the Christmas holiday; this could be interpreted as a build-up of information suddenly being released or it could be because there is a lot of ‘set-up’ information sent around at the beginning of the year.

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