February 2004

This will be the 101st month of my email contest. I had seriously considered wrapping it up after the 100th month, as that would be a nice clean place to stop. But it has become a tradition, and there are people expecting it. And more to the point, there were people actively trying to win in February. I couldn't let them down, now could I? So the contest continues, and off we go.

In February, Al decided that he would once again go for the win, having last won last year in August. From the very beginning of the month he put in an effort almost every day. Every once in awhile he'd slack and have a day with under 10 emails, but most days there was a steady stream. 20 here, 30 there. On a number of days he broke 100 emails. With the biggest effort on February 14th... Valentines Day... where instead of doing something nice for his wife, he spent his time sending me 401 emails. In addition to the various reply to all's on wider discussions, Al sent me lots of interesting phrases and movie titles, and he counted a couple times, and the alphabet, and other fun things. He put in his last effort for the month on February 26th with a final 40 emails, then went away for the month, confidant that his four digit total for the month would be sufficient.

But meanwhile, while Al slept and sent no emails the last few days of the month, there was another challenger, out of the blue. Having last made the top ten in May, but not having won since August of 1997... over six years ago... Greg decided he wanted to make a stand and make a comeback.

Early in the month Barb had tried to make a statement by sending a lot of "reply to all" messages to all sorts of people, saying she did not want to be "replied to all" on things. Greg started his campaign there, replying to each and every one of Barb's emails. Undoubtedly to Barb's relief, he replied just to me, not to Barb as well. But to me, he made sarcastic comments about each and every thing Barb sent out. That got him 49 or so emails on the 23rd. He'd had a lot of fun, but he decided that was not enough.

So on the 25th Greg started sending bunches of messages, with real paragraphs of content, but about a sentence per email. He did this for a few days and racked up some more email, but not enough. So on the 29th, Greg decided to take that into overdrive. He took a few things he had written for other purposes, and broke them up into one word emails, then being geeky and using a command line email client, he sent the already written and queued messages out manually one at a time. They started coming in so fast that I immediately started questioning if it was truly manual, or automated and thus disqualified. After some discussion, Greg convinced me that his method was manual enough to count, although I remain dubious in some respects. But unless he was lying to me (which I don't believe, but if he did then shame on you Greg) Greg did do manual individual work on each email, and therefore it counts.

Looking at each minute of the day, there were 72 minutes during which Greg sent email. These were all between 04:18:00 UTC and 07:28:59 UTC... a span of 3 hours and 11 minutes. Not counting the minutes Greg sent no email at all, his average rate was 31 emails per minute, which is pretty impressive. In 06:50 UTC and 07:28 UTC he only sent one email each. But he reached his peak rate 07:00 UTC when he sent out 57 emails in one minute. Almost one a second for the whole minute. But then again, this was just how long it was taking him to SEND the emails, not to write them, which had been done before he sent anything. So maybe it isn't THAT impressive.

Anyway, at the end Greg had sent 1006 more emails than Al, even with Al's pretty impressive performance. So, back after a six year absence, the monthly email crown goes to Greg. Congratulations Greg!! Welcome back to the top.

Jan

Mar