A Twitter friend, @marismith, has just returned from a long vacation RVing across Alaska and the Canadian west. She discovered 1200 e-mails waiting for her.

I got thinking about that number. In the old days, a couple of years ago, we would have been talking about phone messages. 1200 messages? Nope, no way. People would call and realize that you were not home and either leave a message or wait until you got back.

She was gone four to six weeks. Being a bright and educated user of the Internet, I’m sure she had her e-mail set to reply an “out of office” message.

Without knowing a thing about her situation, my guess was that she had a lot of spam. With the best filter, I still get 6-8 spam e-mails a day. I also have Google alerts, and daily e-mails from job hunting sites.

I’m on a couple of military mailing lists, so I get a bunch of press releases from Iraq. Bloggers’ Roundtable generates a few more e-mails each week.

I get the odd e-mail from family and friends, but if I were on vacation they’d know not to e-mail me. I get social media notifies for friends and followers.

Someone signed me up for the Pajamas Media morning summary, feh. I’m on the HARO list for 3 e-mails each weekday.

Sadly, examining the preceding, most of my e-mail comes from lists and not people. [frown]

OK, so to the 1200. Find the obvious spams and delete. Find the e-mails from the various lists and delete those that are too old to be useful.

Mari gets 30-40 e-mails a day. I get about half that. She’s got 120-240 e-mails that she will want to spend time on, my guess.

But none of this would have happened if she only had an answering machine.