Trying to avoid thesis-writing without stepping into the dripping hot air outside lead me to do two items of ehouse-keeping this weekend: (a) tidy up my bookmarks, sorting out a weekly schedule of sites to whizz through in an effort to get Futurelog up and running again; and (b) tidy up my Inbox, which had grown to a heaving and swollen mass over the past twelve months (I keep all my email, as it takes less time than working out what to throw away).

Consequently, I am proud to unveil my Top Ten Email Correspondents (by volume). I’ll be first to admit the measure of success in this race is rather crude (simple bytes on disk) but there are limits to one’s obsessiveness. I suspect David might not hold the coveted top position if we looked at pure characters written, as our exchanges involve a heavy percentage of trailing quoted messages. Whereas Genny might climb higher, perhaps to the very peak, if we were to tally original words.

Sweeping aside these statistical quibbles I do find it rather surprising. People whom I correspond with every few weeks, and even then only in a handful of sentences, are remarkably high up the list. For some reason I imagined the top would be filled by hefty, frequent and deep emails exchanged with far off net.friends, rather than brief messages flung between real world pals. This, I now realise, doesn’t make sense, as I haven’t had any purely net.friends for years now, which is probably not a bad thing, but I miss it all the same. Anyway, cue the Phil Lynott countdown theme and away we go…

1	David	1,320K
	Known him since we were about eight. I think he laughed at my trousers or something.
2	Stacy	1,105K
	We go way back to ‘95, those heady days when anything seemed possible.
3	Rachel	1,103K
	Galleries, movies, holidays, suit-buying advice… what more could one want?
4	Mum	868K
	We go back quite a way and she’s set to hit the top before long.
5	Genny	849K
	My first ever net.friend. That’s a very long story.
6	Ted	695K
	Mostly full of his (great) film reviews.
7	Lizzie	649K
	It’s been quiet for a while, but I reckon it’ll pick up.
8	Mia	611K
	As you can tell, she is, of course, “fabu”.
9	Sue	541K
	My sis.
10	Tim	516K
	Very little of late because he’s been away, lucky man.

That’s it! Come back next year for another exciting rundown!