'Email is at an inflection point': new study finds only 13% of emails sent worldwide were actually written by humans

• Fewer than half of the emails currently being sent are making it past spam filters to the inbox
• The most common error is that they're being market as phishing, scam, malware or botnets
• Marketers need to change their strategies and metrics to suit a new era of email

New Hostinger research exclusively shared with TechRadar Pro has claimed only 13% of global email traffic is actually human-written – with the remaining 87% of emails generated by automated systems.

The trend marks a major shift for email-based communication, which has gone from being a person-to-person tool to a largely automated marketing tool.

But it also reveals a growing issue for communicators, with not even half (44%) of emails actually reaching inboxes (for Hostinger customers in January 2026, at least), and the rest being flagged as suspicious, unsafe or malicious.