I need to know how many email addresses exist in each country of the
world.  If hard counts are not available estimates will do.

Thats like asking how many letterboxes there are.

Even estimates are going to be hard to come by.  I use a different
e-mail alias for every form I fill out, to track who sells their lists
to spammers.  I'd guess that I've got about 100 addresses just myself,
and others have many more than that.

And when you consider the million who use Hotmail, there is no way of
breaking them down by country.

And when you consider the many millions who use Hotmail, there is no
way of breaking them down by country.

If I register a domain name and get it hosted, I can have, in effect,
an INFINITE number of email addresses at that domain, because an email
message sent to anything@thatdomainname.com will be deposited in that
domain's default mailbox (if I set the controls that way). That's just
one domain name.

Come on, googlers missy and robertskelton, this can't be *that* hard
to estimate -- assuming of course that e-mail address means "an
address which someone reads with regularity (e.g. more than once a
year) and that forwards to a unique inbox (to exclude people who have
domains that funnel all mail to the same place.)

A first pass would be to take figures for internet usage in the
country, and assume that everyone (or everyhousehold) has an average
of, say, one e-mail address that meets the above criteria. Addicts
will have more, but a good number probably just surf. In the US, with
I think around 150 million with access to the internet, that gives 150
million e-mail addresses. In the extreme, perhaps between 0.5 and 1.5
is a good range for possible averages.

You should be able to get usage stats for other countries by looking
at the ISPs there. Even if everyone in the world uses hotmail.com,
they have to log on from their home country!

I'd estimate no more than half a billion e-mail addresses for the
entire world. (Which could be served by a single domain with seven
letter usernames.)

And--what is really being counted?  I have three serious ones, not
counting one at work, and another half a dozen just for fun.  Would
you count that as ten, or would you really want to know how many
*people* you could reach by e-mail?  My ten would just equal one,
then.  I could have a hundred or a thousand almost as easily through
free services such as HotMail.  Moreover, three domain names are owned
by members of my household, and each of them furnishes us with e-mail
addrsesing options.  I can't even give a reliable estimate of how many
e-mail addresses in total belong just to the members of my family.

I know lots of people who have more than one e-mail address for
various reasons, such as dodging the spam that comes after you make
online purchases and conducting private correspondence of various
kinds.  Some use a particular address just for some special interest
or activity or business purpose.  I would guess that most people who
have a personal e-mail account also have an e-mail address where they
work, although not necessarily the other way around.