How to Count Your Number of Daily Emails in Outlook and Gmail

How many emails do you think you receive on a daily basis? Is it more than 100? More than 200? Does it tend to rise sharply on Monday and fall off by Friday? Does it seem to rise dramatically during your busy season? Wouldn’t it be nice if you had an email counter to just tell you? 😎

You might be naturally curious about how many emails you receive per day, or you may have an important reason to figure this out. Either way, you’ll need the help of email metering, or some kind of email counter, to find the answer.

In this guide, we’ll cover the merits of monitoring your daily received emails, then explain how to count your number of daily emails in both Outlook and Gmail. We’ll provide you with multiple methods you can use, including using an automated email counter to do the job for you.

Why Use an Email Counter? 5 Common Reasons

Why would you want to know how many emails you receive daily?

There are a few common motivations:

1. Workload analysis.

Email is the most popular communication channel for professionals all over the world, and it tends to be associated with everything you do. You’ll receive emails from clients, get email notifications about new tasks in project management apps, and get roped into complex discussions about upcoming projects.

Accordingly, the number of emails you receive is a decent indication of how busy you are; by tracking your daily received emails, you can figure out how your workload changes over time, and how it compares to the workloads of others. If you’re receiving too many emails, it’s a good justification for delegating more tasks. If you’re not receiving enough, you may need more responsibilities.

2. Performance assessment.

Similarly, measuring and reporting on your daily received emails can help you assess and explain your performance. During your annual review, you may bring up the number of emails you receive each day, and how that number has increased over time.

Depending on the circumstances, and the data you’ve gathered, this may be a good justification for asking for a raise.

3. Time allocation assessment.

If you’re like many professionals, you spend the majority of your day reading, organizing, and responding to emails. So how much time is that really draining from you?

Observing the number of emails you receive will help you figure out how effectively you’re allocating your time, and how you might be able to improve.

4. Identifying pain points.

In line with this, you can figure out your biggest pain points, and in several ways. For example, let’s say you receive an average of 100 emails per day during normal conditions, but every Wednesday, that spikes to 160 emails. What happens on Wednesdays that could account for this, and is there a way to mitigate this effect?

Let’s say you receive 100 emails per day, but 20 of them always come from the same needy client or over-communicative employee. How can you streamline communication here to remain productive without wasting time?

5. Secondary data analytics.

Daily received emails may also be linked to other variables worth studying. For example, if your business decides to host a massive customer appreciation sale, do you see an increase in the number of daily emails you receive during the week that follows?

After publishing important FAQ content for your clients online, do you see a reduction in the number of inbound queries you receive via email?

How to Count Your Number of Daily Emails in Outlook

If you use Outlook, there are a few options for how to count your number of daily emails.

Option 1: Use EmailAnalytics

This is the no-brainer option. Just start our free trial and within 60 seconds you’ll have a count of all your emails, along with a host of other interesting metrics about your email activity. Don’t overthink this one 😉

Option 2: Use the search bar

The first option is pretty straightforward. Outlook has an intuitive search bar, where you can look for emails matching almost any criteria you choose.

Here, type: “received: Today,” and you’ll generate a list of all the emails you’ve received on this date. Count these manually, or check the lower-left corner to see the number of items generated by this search. You can also run the same search for a specific date to retroactively analyze how many emails you’ve received on days past.

Option 3: Set up a custom search

The second is a bit more complicated, but it’s a way to permanently set up your account so in the future, you can easily determine the number of emails you’ve received on a given day.

1. Click on the Folder tab and click New Search Folder. It’s in the upper left.
2. Select Create a Custom Search Folder. Then click Choose.
3. Enter a name for the search folder. I suggest you call it “Total emails from Today.”
4. Click the Criteria button, click the Message tab, and select “received” from the Time drop down list. Then, specify Today, and click OK to apply the changes.
5. Click the Browse button, and check both your Inbox and “Search subfolders.” Then click OK.
6. Find the new search folder in the list on the left, right click it, and click Properties.
7. Check the option “Show total number of items.” Then click OK.

Now, at a glance, you’ll be able to see how many emails you’ve received on a given day.

If you want to get a high-level perspective of how many emails you receive per day, and how those trends have changed, you’ll need the help of an email counter for Outlook to get the job done. One such tool is MyAnalytics. For other Outlook email analytics options, click the link!

How to Count Your Number of Daily Emails in Gmail

If you use Gmail, you can use email metering to figure out how many daily emails you receive.

Again, you have a few different options for how to count and analyze the number of emails you receive per day in Gmail.

Option 1: Conduct a Gmail advanced search

The first option is to utilize Gmail’s fantastic search feature to generate a list of emails you’ve received from a given day. There are a few different ways to search by date, but they all have the same ultimate effect.

For example, you can use Gmail’s Advanced Search option to search by date. If you do this, click on the down arrow in the Search bar, then change the date to be within 1 day of the current date. Click Search to generate a list of emails that match this criterion. You can also apply any date you wish here, so you can see how many daily emails you received on past days. In the upper right corner, you’ll see a number reflecting how many total emails match this search.

You can also search using Gmail search operators, with one or both of the following parameters in the search bar:

after:YYYY/MM/DD

before:YYYY/MM/DD

You can even mix and match search operators within a single search. For example, below is an example for a list of emails between the given date ranges that contain the word “taco”.

Enter the date(s) of your choice to see how many emails you’ve received on a given day. Again, in the upper right corner, you’ll see a number reflecting how many total emails match this search. For an in-depth overview, see our guide on how to search by date in Gmail.

However, this method is manually intensive, and it’s limited in more than a few ways; for example, you’ll have to search one day at a time and plot out the differences on your own to learn more about how your incoming daily emails have changed over time.

Option 2: Use EmailAnalytics (the easy method)

Why go through all that hassle when you can just use an automatic email counter to do it for you? 😉

Our flagship app, EmailAnalytics, is a data visualization, email metering, and analytics tool designed for Gmail and G Suite. It’s an email counter for Gmail that’s incredibly easy to use; with a few clicks, we’ll sync with your Gmail account, and you’ll be able to see detailed data visuals that indicate how many emails you receive per day, plus dozens of other metrics, including:

• The number of emails sent per day.
• Your top senders and recipients.
• Your average email thread length.
• Your busiest times of day.
• Your busiest days of the week.
• Your average email response time.

If you want to know how many emails you receive in Gmail, this is the fastest and most convenient way.

Plus, you’ll learn many new details about your daily and weekly email habits in the process. Sign up for a free trial today, and get a better understanding of how you use email!