Emails Received versus Sent in October

Back in 1999, when I first got online at home, one thing I looked forward to was possibly meeting women to date, since I was never very good at doing this in real life. The first few months proved more frustrating than imagined--plenty of correspondents but few I was attracted to. I gave up, and then one gal showed up who became a friend for a few years, though we weren't compatible for dating. Over the course of the next year, my communication with potential dates grew, until, again, I got frustrated not so much with lack of attraction but with the lack of compatibility.

Online communication never did turn into much more than just that since then. And I've backed away from doing as much of it as I used to, while e-mail itself has been replaced by Facebook and other things that I don't use much of (I'm old school and stick to e-mail largely).

I decided to look at what kind of communication I do via personal e-mail. Interestingly, I do largely communicate mostly with women, as is evidenced by the following graph. And I send more personal e-mail than I receive.

Postage per Year

The travails of the U.S. Postal System are well established. As people have moved toward e-mail and other electronic forms of transferring information, they have needed the services of the postal system less and less. I was curious whether my own experience would bear that trend out. 

In my case, however, there are a few things that might mitigate against a decrease in the amount I spend on postage each year. First, I have generally not moved toward using e-payment systems. Second, back in 2008, I decided to make a concerted effort to submit more manuscripts for publication than I had previously been doing. (I used to submit an average of about 20 manuscripts a year; I now submit about 120.) At the same time, however, more of more publications accept electronic submissions, which means that many of those manuscripts don't go through the mail.

So what does the record bear out? In general, despite the rise in manuscript submissions, the amount I spend on postage has, for the most part, gone down most years. At best, I match the postage of the year before I started submitting more.