Email statistics 2026: users, daily volume and spam share

About 392.5 billion emails are sent and received every day in 2026, by roughly 4.73 billion email users, according to The Radicati Group's forecast. Close to 45 percent of email traffic is spam, based on Kaspersky's 2025 measurement. Every figure on this page links to the original report, with the year the data covers.

Key email statistics at a glance

How many emails are sent per day in 2026?

The figure nearly every article quotes is 392.5 billion. It comes from one table in the executive summary of The Radicati Group's Email Statistics Report, 2024-2028. Two things about it are usually left out.

First, it is a forecast. The report was written in 2024, so the 2026 value is a projection made two years ago, and nobody has published a measured global count since. Second, it counts emails "sent and received", business and consumer together, which includes spam and automated mail.

Here is the full table from the report:

If you see 408.2 billion presented as the 2026 number, that is the 2027 row. Other figures quoted for 2026, such as 347 billion, do not appear in this table at all.

One note on the link: radicati.com did not load when we checked on October 11, 2026, so the link goes to the Internet Archive's copy of the original PDF. We found no newer edition of the report.

How many people use email?

Radicati's same report puts worldwide email users at 4.481 billion in 2024, 4.594 billion in 2025 and 4.73 billion in 2026, rising to 4.97 billion in 2028, with growth of about 3 percent a year. It states that "over half of the world population uses email in 2024". Radicati counts active accounts only, meaning accounts accessed at least once in the last three months.

For scale, the International Telecommunication Union estimates that 6 billion people, 74 percent of the world's population, were online in 2025. Dividing Radicati's 2025 user forecast by that figure suggests roughly three in four internet users have email. That ratio is our own arithmetic across two sources that count differently, so treat it as a rough guide.

Survey data from Europe points the same way. Eurostat reports that in 2025, 82 percent of people aged 16 to 74 in the EU had sent or received email, the same share as used instant messaging. The Netherlands (98 percent), Denmark (97 percent), Ireland and Finland (both 95 percent) were highest.

How many emails does the average person get per day?

There are two honest answers, and they measure different things.

The global average. Radicati's 2026 forecasts work out to about 83 emails sent and received per user per day (392.5 billion divided by 4.73 billion). This is our calculation, and it includes spam that never reaches an inbox.

The office worker. Microsoft's Work Trend Index special report, published June 17, 2025 and based on Microsoft 365 telemetry up to February 15, 2025, found that "the average worker receives 117 emails daily", most of them skimmed in under 60 seconds. The same report says mass emails with 20 or more recipients rose 7 percent in a year while one-on-one threads fell 5 percent, and that 40 percent of people online at 6 am are reviewing email.

Microsoft's number covers people who use Microsoft 365 at work. It says nothing about personal inboxes.

How much email is spam?

It depends on who is measuring and where they sit in the mail flow.

• Kaspersky: 44.99 percent in 2025. In its spam and phishing report for 2025, published February 11, 2026, Kaspersky says the average share of spam in global email traffic was 44.99 percent, down 2.28 percentage points from 2024. The fourth quarter was the busiest at 49.26 percent, peaking in November at 52.87 percent. Russia was the largest source, sending 32.50 percent of spam.
• Google: nearly 15 billion blocked a day. Google said on October 3, 2023 that Gmail's defenses "stop more than 99.9% of spam, phishing and malware from reaching inboxes and block nearly 15 billion unwanted emails every day". Google has not published a newer daily figure that we could find.
• Microsoft: 5.2 billion screened a day. The Microsoft Digital Defense Report 2026, published October 1, 2026, says Microsoft screens 5.2 billion emails daily on average for malware and phishing. That is a count of everything scanned, not of spam.

These are vendor measurements of each company's own traffic. Kaspersky's percentage is the only one that states a global share, and it reflects mail seen by Kaspersky's filters.

If you want a rough daily count, 45 percent of Radicati's 376.4 billion for 2025 is about 169 billion messages. We show the arithmetic because the two inputs come from different companies using different methods. No single source publishes that number.

Since February 1, 2024, Google's sender rules require anyone sending more than 5,000 messages a day to Gmail accounts to authenticate their mail and keep the spam rate reported in Postmaster Tools below 0.3 percent. If your own inbox is the problem, our guide to stopping spam emails covers the practical steps.

How much email is malicious?

A smaller share than spam, but the more expensive one.

Cloudflare's 2025 Radar Year in Review, published December 15, 2025, found that an average of 5.6 percent of the emails analyzed by Cloudflare Email Security in 2025 were malicious, generally ranging between 4 and 6 percent through most of the year. Deceptive links were the top threat category, present in 52 percent of malicious messages, up from 43 percent in 2024.

Kaspersky's 2025 report counted 144,722,674 malicious email attachments blocked by its mail antivirus during the year.

The cost shows up in the FBI's numbers. The IC3 2025 annual report, published in April 2026, recorded 24,768 business email compromise complaints with $3.05 billion in reported losses, second only to investment fraud. We collect the rest of the attack data in our phishing statistics roundup.

Which email clients do people use?

Litmus publishes a monthly email client market share table calculated from more than 1 billion opens. For July 2026 it shows:

1. Apple: 62.26 percent
2. Gmail: 27.03 percent
3. Outlook: 5.83 percent
4. Yahoo Mail: 2.59 percent

Read the Apple number with care. Litmus measures opens with a tracking image, and it notes that opens from people using Apple's Mail Privacy Protection are "not considered reliable opens", because Apple downloads images whether or not the message is read. So this table is a measure of where tracking images get loaded, and it overstates Apple's real share of reading. The mechanics are in our email tracking statistics page.

Popular numbers we left out

Some figures appear on most email statistics pages. We could not trace them to a current primary source on October 11, 2026, so they are not in the tables above.

• Gmail's user count. Several different figures circulate. We could not open a Google statement that gives a current number.
• "$36 return for every $1 spent on email marketing." Widely repeated. We could not open the survey behind it or confirm its date.
• "The average office worker receives 121 emails a day." We could not find the document this comes from. Microsoft's 117 is the figure with a traceable method.
• A measured 2026 email volume. It does not exist in public. Every 2026 volume figure is the Radicati forecast.

How we picked these numbers

We used a number only if we could open the original document on October 11, 2026 and find the figure in it. That means analyst reports from the firm that produced them, statistical offices, and companies reporting on their own systems. Where a figure is a forecast, a vendor's view of its own traffic or our own arithmetic, the text says so. Each entry carries the year the data covers and the publication date, because a 2026 headline often sits on 2024 data. Last checked: October 11, 2026.

FAQ

How many emails are sent per day in 2026?

About 392.5 billion sent and received worldwide, according to The Radicati Group's forecast from its 2024-2028 report. The figure includes business and consumer mail, spam and automated messages. It is a projection made in 2024. No measured global count for 2026 has been published.

How many people use email in 2026?

Roughly 4.73 billion, according to the same Radicati forecast, up from 4.594 billion in 2025. Radicati counts active accounts that were accessed within the last three months. In the EU, Eurostat found that 82 percent of people aged 16 to 74 sent or received email in 2025.

What percentage of email is spam?

Kaspersky measured 44.99 percent of global email traffic as spam in 2025, down from about 47 percent in 2024. The share was highest in November 2025 at 52.87 percent. Other companies report their own traffic differently, so percentages vary by source.

Is email use still growing?

Yes, slowly. Radicati forecasts user growth of about 3 percent a year and volume growth of about 4 percent a year through 2028. Eurostat's 2025 survey shows email use in the EU level with instant messaging at 82 percent.

Much of the mail counted above carries a tracking image. Secria Mail removes tracking pixels automatically and senders never see your IP address, and there is a free plan.