I need to know how the PERSONAL email writing habits of email users
have changed in the past two decades.  Note that it must be a survey
on personal emails sent.  That is, between friends, family, etc... ie,
not strangers.  An idea answer would have statistics and cite the
source.  Thank you.

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Clarification of Question by etienne-ga on 02 Sep 2002 10:14 PDT

This question has to do with PERSONAL EMAIL habits of americans over
the past two decades.  That is, how many personal (friends, family,
close people etc) emails Americans send per day, and how that figure
has perhaps changed (I hope to find) over the past few decades.

This question is NOT a repeat.  The other question has to do with
snail mail, not e-mail.

This question is not a repeat.  This question deals with EMAIL writing
habits, while the other one deals with PAPER LETTER writing habits. 
Thanks for the comment, though... perhaps I should make the question
clearer.

The household-originated letter mail market, he says, constitutes some
10% of the mail stream in the U.S. This market has been heavily
affected by the growth of e-mail, but its decline has had almost no
effect on Pitney Bowes, which concentrates on the business market.
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/articles.cfm?catid=14&articleid=346&homepage=yes

... a survey of Canadians by Angus Reid that reports 52% of email
users "couldn’t live without it". 88% of users email more than once a
week (62% do so daily), with the average user receiving 22 messages
per day. Around 60% complained that they receive too much irrelevant
mail (42% received messages with "the wrong tone" and 37% got
bad-taste joke email, although 35% like receiving joke emails at
work).

According to this study, email is the most commonly participated in
Internet activity by far. It is accessed multiple times weekly by 88%
of online Canadians, and daily by 62%¹,
¹Up from 84% using email weekly and 53% daily in the exact time period
last year


http://www.angusreid.com/media/dsp_displaypr_cdn.cfm?id_to_view=1345
http://www.analysphere.com/19Nov01/connectivity.htm

Respondents were asked how often in the week prior to the interview
they communicated with other people by letter, or by phone.  In 1995,
usage of both increased from non-users who had not heard of the
Internet (letters, 37% reported sending at least one letter; phone,
41% reported making 11 or more calls) up through current users
(letters, 56%; phone, 72%). For letter contact, there was no
difference between users and non-users, after controlling for
significant influences of gender and education. For phone contact,
Internet usage was still associated with increased phone contact after
controlling for significant influences of education and age. In 2000,
two-thirds of Internet users had written no letters in the prior week,
while 60.4% had made more than 10 telephone calls.

http://www.scils.rutgers.edu/~rrice/syntopia.htm