True cost of one email?

Factual Questions
1

Anyone out there have information on a pet peeve of mine. I think the corporate world especially sends waaaaay too much email. That it is counter productive. And that there is a direct economic cost for adding people to the To line or the CC line. I think this is also relevant for personal use but I want to try reduce the amount of email and in addition to making my life easier there is a “green” side benefit.

There are a couple of components:
First, the actual direct cost of the servers, software, energy, storage, PC, etc to send one single email. This has to be a reasonably directly quantifiable cost. There should be studies out there somewhere.

Second, is the opportunity cost. One can make assumptions for a fully loaded personnel cost; how much time to open and read an email when one is the single To: recipient, one of several To: receipients, CC: recipient, BCC: recipient; average number of To emails that get a response or forwarded, average time per response; ditto for CC mail; what is the cost of Reply All versus a single reply; average manual delete of spam cost; read FYI cost, read an executive email cost, etc. There are an awful lot of permutations.

One would have to make lot of assumptions but I’m really curious if the number is significantly large and could result in significant cost & energy savings. To say it another way, does it cost 1 cent or 1 dollar or 10 dollars to send a single email in the corporate world? What does that email from the CEO that goes out to 50,000 employees actually cost? We think of email as having virtually zero cost but I probably spend 10 hours a week doing “just” email. I know I would spend less time on email if I wasn’t sent so much chaff I don’t need. Hell, I would spend less time on email if there was a pop up window that said “do you reallly want to reply all you numbnut?”

End goal is to eventually be able to boil it down to things like:
-send 1 email to a single recipient costs $0.01 in operating costs and $0.25 in opportunity cost.
-take 1 person off of ccmail and save 10 cents
-reply all to 10 people costs your company a dollar on average xxx
-an email thread with 1 person on the To line costs x versus and email with 1 person on the To line and 1 person on CC

Any of the teeming millions ever looked at this before and have some data to point me at? Thanks in advnace

2

Figure that the average home user pays $10 a month for internet access and probably businesses get a discount of (for instance) $4 per month per user. Meaningful email consumes maybe 1% of that in terms of byte count, so we’re looking at $0.04 per email (give or take.)

On the other hand, the average person is payed about $40,000 a year or about $19.23 an hour. If the average worker spends an hour every day on email, then the cost on that end is $2.40 per hour (i.e. 1/8th of your salary is being paid towards reading email.)

Decreasing emails sent would at most save them 1% of their internet fee. Decreasing emails read could decrease 1/8th of the cost of their total work force (theorizing that the workers would be working productively instead).

3

This is an almost unanswerable question.

First, the infrastructure costs of sending an email are virtually zero - the amount of juice consumed by the network for one single email is more or less unmeasurable. There is some cost to write email to disk, and some to run the client on your computer, but the variables are too diverse to even get a ballpark figure. A cost of $.04 dollars per email is going to be about 10000000000 times too high though. One 30 second youtube video is going to be 10,000 times the bandwidth of an email, and no one pays by the bit anyway.

The costs of answering/writing/reading/etc are similarly impossible to measure, though probably bigger than the infrastructure costs. The question here, though, is how you value an email. Some (dude look at this pic of a cat) are nearly worthless GDP-wise (but how much is a laugh worth in dollars?). Some emails (Should we buy this company) are going to be ‘worth’ a lot more.

In short, the physical cost of email is so close to zero as to be unmeasurable, because the infrastructure exists and consumes about the same amount of power no matter how many emails you send.

The productivity cost, on the other hand, is unmeasurable, because some people are generating value by sending/receiving email, and some people are losing value, but there’s no way to tell what the average is, and it would be misleading even if you had an average.

If you take the bus one day a year, that will outweigh your email “greeness” by a thousandfold or more. If you think it takes too much time, that might be valid, but that’s a pretty subjective measure. I don’t think anyone will be able to give you numbers that are meaningful.

4

You also need to consider that people can access work email at home so the cost to the company for that is nothing, and people don’t have to open and read an email if it doesn’t interest them. I get a lot of email to my work account, but I only open a small percentage of it.

5

You are confusing two totally different things. The cost to that CEO is indeed virtually zero. The fact that you spend 10 hours a week reading it is totally irrelevant to him.

The proof is that while these CEOs might not be nice people, they are indeed money-hungry and trying to make a profit. If they didn’t profit from the few people who respond to these emails, they would not send them out at all.

6

That profit will be affected by the cost of the time employees spend reading email.

7

FWIW, our company marketing emails (the ones from us to you, the consumer) cost $5 per 1,000 to send. That would be a first order estimate of the “actual direct cost of the servers, software, energy, storage, PC, etc” although it also includes tracking, tech support, whitelisting, and some other features as well as profit to the vendor.

8

muttrox, thanks, that’s a GQ answer. So it costs you guys about half a cent to spam me. :eek:

I would appreciate if there were more GQ answers instead of WAGs here. Thanks.

9

[tangent]
You were kidding around, but folks like me are understandably sensitive to spam accusations. We only send our emails to people who affirmatively ask for them, we have an enormous click through rate, a very low opt-out rate, and many verbatim responses and research to show that our program is a true win-win for us **and **the consumer. Not **all **of us are evil that must be destroyed.
[/tangent]

10

I think the OPs real goal is costing out internal corporate mail. Not marketing mail / spam, nor personal mail.

As other have said, the marginal cost of the technological infrastructure is near zero. The cost, and any possible benefit, is to be found in the man-hours spent reading and reacting to the mail.

When I cc 10 people on something, I am asking each of them to spend a couple of minutes. That’s 20 man-minutes of the Corporations’ wages I just spent. When the CEO sends something to 50,000 employees, he spent 100,000 man-minutes or 16667 man-hours. At $25/ hr average including bennies, that’s almost $42,000.

Since the CEO is, or should be, a rational guy interested in profit and loss, was the email profitable, given that he spent $42K on it (plus his cost of preparation)?

My take: The cost of mass-blast email is almost always underestimated / ignored. And it’s non-trivial.

When dealing with CCs on departmental-level stuff there is a clear tradeoff. If CCing you means I don’t have to hold a meeting to keep you informed on project X, that’s *potentially *net money saved. If a wider CC prevents someone from doing something counterproductive or wasteful which they’d have done if they’d never heard about my project X or plot development Y, there’s again a countervailing savings against the cost of more people reading more things just in case.

Finally, there’s the “social” aspect. A lot of people are arguing that corporations should have internal FaceBook-like things and that most all office employees should be blogging on it for internal consumption.

Yes, that’d take at least an hour a day writing and another hour a day reading all this drivel. The claimed offsetting benefit is that a lot of corporate drone effort is duplicative, and they could search it up faster than they could re-invent it, if only it was recorded & searchable.

The other thought is that most real progess in growth & profits and all things Good come when ideas one person has but can’t implement, meet with people who can implement but don’t have ideas. And engaging everyone in making and panning the gravel ensures the gold will also come out and be discovered.

Do I personally buy it? In the innovative areas of innovative companies, yes, a bit. In the expense reimbursement processing branch of HR of Collossal But Stupid Corp, no.

My bottom line: A general rule ofeconomics is that there will be too much bad and not enough good supplied. The cost to me when sending excessive CCs is small, while the cost to my readers is larger. So net, most corporations will save money by actively encouraging people to reduce (not eliminate) CCing.

But compared to the wastage caused by people spending work minutes on personal stuff, or having almost no clue how to operate the tools they have because they’ve never been trained on them (e.g. witness the often clueless MS Office questions we answer here.), I don’t hold out much hope for stopping or slowing the email blizzard.

11

Im not being very useful, but just some observations.

  1. Not every mail is read. I receive tons of management-speak mail which I routinely ignore (Things are fine! we are great!!, etc)
  2. I think the infrastructure cost of a mail is close to zero, where it adds up is with the readers time. The workaround is to add a “dont read if” clause at the beginning. But like LSLguy says, its not like many people would have spent the time in productive ways anyway.
  3. Adding people just in case, is a thin red line. Sometimes its better to add people, sometimes its not, theres no way of being sure, unfortunately.
  4. Sending jokes via office mail is inexcusable. I hate it!

Setting up filters usually saves me a lot of time, there are a few spammers in my loop who send lots of unimportant mails which I check only when I have nothing better to do. What bugs me the most are the boring talks by the CEO etc, which are painfully short on facts and full of BS.

12

My apologies. I thought this thread was about email sent from a company to potential customers, a.k.a. spam. Recent posts made me realize that this thread is about internal emails from the bosses to the staff.

So I’ll just add one more idea: You can’t just ask, “How much does it cost to send this email?” You also have to ask, “How much would it cost to communicate this via other means, such as a bunch of meetings?” And then compare the costs.

13

This is exactly what came to mind when I read the OP. It’s fine to determine the cost of every email that is not necessary, but when you start to include the messages that truly are important, any calculations are out the window because the value of most email messages is highly variable.

As an example, someone in my organization could ask me a question via email and by answering it, the company makes more money. It also costs the company a small amount of my time to answer it. But this can be offset a bit because I can wait for a good time to read and respond to the email.

Without email, I would get a phone call, possibly interrupting my current task, and keeping me busy as much or more time that it took to answer the email. So which is the better value?

If my phone rings and I am talking to somebody, I may not be able to answer. Or I could be away from my desk. In these cases, the caller will have to leave a voicemail or call back, wasting more time than the email would.

So to the OP, I think your question should be: “what is the cost of an unnecessary email or the cost of adding the wrong recipeients balanced by the cost benefits of important and necessary emails.”

14

Actually, saying that something is unquantifiable as stated is a perfect GQ answer. It usually indicates that the question was not properly framed.

The question tries to average a result among thousands of separate situations, in companies large and small, and in differing types of communications, from critical knowledge essential to work to corporate image building to generalized information. Different companies have different policies about what is to be sent out to whom as well. You can’t assume that every communication that is sent out is received by everyone.

muttrox’s estimate was specifically for corporate to customer emails, not internal, and so included costs not germane to the discussion. I’m sure it uses a number of assumptions and approximations, many unique to the company, as well. It may be a first order approximation, but that just means that it’s within the negligible cost estimate made by others.

The other side of the equation, the reader cost, is even worse. This question is identical to all those hoary stories about how March Madness costs the workforce $54.8 billion a year in lost worktime or some such. Every one of these stories is sheer nonsense.

What’s not built into those fake numbers is that recreational and social interaction among workers is a natural, inevitable, and positive part of any job. Just as getting information about the workings of the company is an inevitable and necessary part of any job. The real question to be asked is how those events fit in to the total work day and whether they have been already discounted when employee productivity is calculated. The answer to that is yes, they have, and the overwhelming majority of workers get their jobs done successfully regardless. Therefore the actual cost of these “intrusions” is zero. Work is speeded up or lengthened to accommodate. And if these particular “intrusions” were eliminated others would appear. Some equivalent of non-work time at work happens every day to every person at every job. No doubt there are a few people who neglect their jobs entirely for this, just as there are those who neglect their jobs to surf for porn or run a second business on the side. Those few tend to get weeded out. However, I’ve never heard of a case where someone was fired for spending too much time on internal corporate communications.

I, like others, have also talked about the value side of the equation that your question neglects. It should be possible to do a study of businesses that intensively communicate with their employees versus those who do so lightly if at all to see whether their productivity patterns differ. This would appear to give you the hard data you want, but the reality is that those kinds of studies are fraught with problems, from comparing different sizes, types, industries, and timeframes, as well as definitions about what a communication is and what should be included. And that still won’t get at the issue of email versus other types of communications. Are you old enough to remember when this information was disseminated through company meetings? I bet not.

You’re trying to take your personal dislike of email as well as your lack of understanding of how email fits into the larger company perspective of employee productivity and turn it into a dollars and cents issue without even considering all sides of the net economic equation. The answers you’re getting are very good considering how bad your question was. I would read them much more closely than you’re doing. Maybe you’d learn that you should be reading those emails you dismiss in the same close way.

15

Nah, there is no operational cost. It doesn’t cost any more for a server to process a quantity of email than it does to sit idle. Storage space is only an issue if people don’t delete their email, and even then the costs are infinitesimal – storing 10,000 emails costs $0.01.*

The opportunity cost is the problem. If a person makes $25 per hour and spends an hour or two each day processing avoidable emails, that adds up to as much as $13,000 per year. Mutiply that over the size of your company, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.

So if you have 100 employees getting 20 pointless emails a day, and the emails are purged after 30 days, your storage costs might soar to $400. The cost to pay those folks to read that email would be around $1.3 million.

So two your original question, you can calculate the cost of a single email by mutiplying the time it takes to read and respond to it by the wage each person makes. If I make $15/an hour, sending me a three minute email costs $0.75 of my time.

  • A 1tb drive retails for just over $100. If you figure emails take up 10kb ( a couple of pargraphs of text), that works out to roughly 1 million emails per dollar of storage space, or 10k per cent.
16

my bad. thanks for the correction.

17

Sheesh, trust me, I do understand the concept of opportunity cost. That email is considerably faster, more efficient, and profitable than the preemail days.

that said, I am deliberately trying to identify (even if in very broad terms) the cost of an email in a corporate sense. Refine it further and qualify it as a global 500 cost. I am not interested in the cost of email versus other methods of communication.

As LSLGuy stated better than I did, the cost is non trivial. How to quantify it though is a bitch.

Hoping that someone in GQ knows of some research in this field. Or some interesting ways of looking at the issue.

18

You might be able to focus in on one especially relevant part of the problem - the time spent to handle one email that is not relevant to the recipient. Take an inbox full of email. Time your handling of each one, perhaps with the help of an assistant. Then go back and identify which emails you really and truly could not have received, with no negative consequences to yourself or the company. What was the average amount of time spent on each of these? That, times an average hourly rate, could be considered the cost of sending an unnecessary email or cc. The more people you gather data from, the better.

19

Interesting discussions for sure. Regarding the two sets of costs I do know that the infrastructure costs are not trivial. If you have a server, a load of software and tons of storage and then the help desk to respond and a whole load of monitoring and management there is a lot of mazooma consumed. You may choose to say one more email has a low marginal cost but the whole kit and kaboodle costs some real dough. The observation about the cost per email was so wide of the mark based upon disk at some cost per terrabite. The total cost needs to allow for all of those people running round IT keeping it going all of that software, all of that support and all of that time doing updates and fixing. Hey! Then the email needs to be backed up and stored for years and so on and so on. Its on tapes that are carried round the country and stored in not so green storage facilities. And all that IT sucks up electricty and bangs it out in heat that needs more electricity to cool it down.

I guess underpinning the original question is the frustration that you get when you see an rather complex note and you strongly suspect that you have been sent it to cover someone’s backside. “Here is what I’m going to do” and “don’t question me if it goes wrong because I told you and you didn’t take the chance to offer an alternative opinion.”

And dozens of similar scenarios. I used to work with a top 30 Brand. The multinantional teams used to fight like cat and dog and the CC lists on emails were pretty long. I counted one with 30 people discussing a delivery failure.

I guess that it is a cultural issue. But I think that if you assume an average of 15 minutes to read, understand and decide on action on a non trivial email for each recipient then multiply that by the number of people on the CC list then you can start racking up some real implied costs. Take the wages and then double them to come to a true cost of employment (in Europe).

In terms of culture there could be some real improvements IMHO. I have a rule with my colleagues that if I’m CC’ed on an email then they should not expect me to respond with care or in great detail. I’ll take it as making a piece of reference material available to me. If they want a response then send me it.

I wonder if any of you have suggestions about useful email protocols?

20

Possibly related question: “How much does it cost to email this, and then have to repeat verbally the contents of the e-mail to recipients who did not bother to read it, and then have to forward it again to them when they claim they cannot find it or deleted it?” as opposed to the older method: “How much would it cost to call these people, have it go into voice mail, and have to verbally repeat the information to people who did not listen to their voice mail?”