The nice people at Backupify have developed a Gmail value calculator to help users answer the much-pondered question…what is your Gmail account really worth?

Backupify's calculation is based on the number of emails in the average Gmail account (5,768), how long it takes to write an average email (1 minute, 43 seconds), and the time needed to rewrite all those emails, based on the average US annual salary ($45,230). And the end result? $3,588.85, Backupify’s Jay Garmon writes in a blog post. In other words, if the average Gmail user were paid to recreate all the Gmail messages he or she’s ever written, it would cost $3,588.85.

Highlights

Some highlights, per Backupify:

The average user's Gmail is worth $3,588.85, and increases by about $1,196 per year
The average user “spends” as much in Gmail every year as they do on their car
The average user's Gmail is worth five times as much as their laptop
The average user's Gmail represents over four weeks of wages
The average user stores one old-school floppy disk (1.44 MB) of Gmail data every day

With Gmail and other mail services acting as “the cloud” for most consumers — and increasingly for business — it is pertinent to think about how much users have in our existing personal clouds already, before the mainstreaming of the cloud begins in the next few years.

Visit the Gmail Value Calculator here to calculate the worth of your own Gmail account, and take a peek at Backupify's infographic from their findings here.