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Do people really print a lot of email?

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I am surprised at how many people (not just in Microsoft but everywhere) have something at the bottom of their email to the effect of “please save paper by not printing this email”.  Is email printing and filing really so prevalent an issue that people are compelled to campaign for its eradication?  At the moment I have 23,146 emails in my mailbox. If we assume each would run to an average of 5 pages when printed and an average paper width of 0.1mm and not allowing for compression, that would print out to a pile of paper 11.5m high. That is approximately 2.6 London double decker buses on top of each other. But I don’t plan to actually print my email to find out.

Doug

Comments

  • Anonymous
    April 10, 2011
    And don't forget that this extra peace of text added at the bottom of to the mail could result in an extra page when printed. So not only is this text useless (when you need to print it, you need to print it), it is actually harmful, because it costs extra paper!

  • Anonymous
    April 10, 2011
    Full ACK. Never understood why people put this footer under their email. That said, I printed some specific emails in the past, like flight information ones. But that's about it. BTW: Same for source code. But have a look at all the feedback about VS 2010 not being able to color print source code... :-( There must be some very printy people out there!

  • Anonymous
    March 04, 2013
    Some people literally print every email they receive - they have filing cabinets full of emails - typically people who are older and are using to manually filing everything. It's more common than you think.