Messages per year
2026 runs through Oct 30. 115 early messages with no recoverable date are left out.
Messages per month
Jan 2008 – Oct 2026
Messages per day
One bar per day, Jan 2008 – Oct 30, 2026 (Pacific time). Hover for the date.
Top thread starters
New threads opened (Michael Robertson excluded). Top 25 of the people checked.
Most-shared publications
New threads whose text links or mentions the outlet's domain.
Most replies by poster
Estimated from a sample of about 2,076 messages on 100 random days. Michael included.
Video & social links
New threads linking these platforms (kept apart from news outlets).
* Twitter / X count is incomplete and includes links in email signatures.
Busiest days ever
Top 50 threads by replies
Replies = messages in the thread minus 1. Gmail splits long conversations into 100-message pieces; pieces with the same subject that continue each other are added together. Hover a bar for the full subject and who started it.
| # | Subject | Started by | Replies | First – last message (Pacific) |
|---|
How this was counted
- The source is one subscriber's archive of the list. Only totals and posters' names are shown: no message text, email addresses or subjects.
- Message counts by day, month and year are exact for that archive. Dates come from when each message arrived, in Pacific time.
- A thread starter is the first message of a thread. Starter counts cover the most active people found by sampling and leave out openers whose subject starts with “Re:”, so they are close but not exhaustive.
- Publication counts include a thread only if the outlet's domain appears in its opening message, quoted text and signatures included. 30 outlets were checked.
- Top threads: subject prefixes (Re:, Fwd:, Pho:) and list tags are removed, and any email address in a subject is redacted. Copies of the same post can be counted twice, and threads below the top 120 weren't checked for continuations, so the last few ranks may shift slightly.
- The number of distinct posters (about 420) and the reply counts are estimates from a sample.