Stefan Mileschin

Boffins from Yahoo Labs in California and Spain have discovered that most emails are read within minutes of them being sent.

The researchers looked at more than two million users who exchanged 16 billion emails over the course of several months.

Nearly 90 percent of users replied to their emails within a day, with about half responding in around 47 minutes. The most frequently occurring reply time was just two minutes.

Most email replies were very short: between five and 43 words. Just 30 percent of emails went on for 100 words or more.

As email exchanges progressed, replies came faster although many emailers lost steam by the last exchange, possibly because there was nothing left to say. Email length also grew as the conversation progressed. But at the end, the last reply was very short.

Email sent on the weekend or overnight had shorter replies. But emails sent first thing in the morning were rewarded with faster and longer replies, researchers found.

Teens and youngsters answered their emails faster than any other group — taking just 13 minutes on average to fire off a response of about 17 words. More mature users – those over 51 years of age – took an average of 47 minutes and 40 words before pressing send on their replies.

Men jump on their emails slightly faster than women, taking 24 minutes to respond compared to 28 minutes. Both sent an average of about 30 words per email.

Emails sent to phones were replied to faster than those sent to tablets. Email responses from tablets faster were than on desktops which took an average of 62 minutes.

http://www.techeye.net/business/most...o-within-a-day