From: Jestapher (email) (web)

Question: Can you tell me a little about your incoming mail flow?

Answer:

Funny you should ask, Jestapher. The other day, I was about to cat /dev/null into my procmail from file, the file that logs every message sent through procmail, and I thought, wait, this could give me some pointless graphs to put on my website!

I have two main accounts, Hemp.Net and oblivion.net. Hemp.Net also includes mail to inwa.net, freespeechseattle.org, and a few others. I've got numbers for the last six months. As you can see from the graph to the right, incoming messages hit a low of 3,000 in June and peaked in August at 4,800.

On Hemp.Net, 43% of my mail comes from mapnews, a mailing list that tracks drug-policy-related articles published in print media. The next largest mailing list, which I'm not subscribed to anymore, is the Northwest Punk List. I was on it during the Free Speech Seattle campaign because the music community was a big support base and I needed to know what was going on. A few other mailing lists make up a good percentage of my mail. The remainder, roughly 25%, is personal or business or activist or whatever mail.

On oblivion.net, much of my mail is system-related. My biggest source of mail is the bugtraq mailing list, which is the computer security mailing list. After that, I get 21% of my mail from the webserver. When people click on a "notify webmaster of this broken link" button and it's not in a user's directory, it gets sent to me. My web page emails me whenever someone takes my quiz, submits feedback, or submits a frequently unasked question. The obv-talk list makes up a good portion at 13%. I get digested nonprofit mailing lists as well as bounced mail to account for another 9%. In all, 20% of my mail is "personal."

Here's an interesting stat. Beginning in June, I started filtering some of my Hemp.Net mail directly to /dev/null, meaning it gets deleted before I ever see it. On Hemp.Net, 13% of all my incoming mail gets piped directly to the trash.

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