Gmail statistics

On which days of the week do you send or receive emails? What time of the day? Well, let’s find out.

I have been somewhat inspired by Stephen Wolfram and used some of the fabulous open-source libraries that are available for data exploration: I have been playing around with imaplib, pandas, seaborn/matplotlib and came up with a script to analyze your email behavior. You can use it with any IMAP account (yes, that includes your Gmail account). Of course, only the emails that are not yet deleted are analyzed – but usually Gmail users archive most of the emails – they are then accessible in the “All Mail” folder. The typical output gives you bar plots as well as violin plots, such as here:

bar plots and violin plots for the sent and received emails.

Interestingly, the analysis here shows that a significant amount of emails is sent after the “classical” work hours (particularly after midnight). As expected, almost no emails are sent during the sleep time (between ~2am and ~8am). Also, the weekend is rather quiet, albeit with Monday approaching increased activity is observed.

The script is released under GPL and can be found at: https://github.com/alexriss/email-stats

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.