The Graymail Economy Report
The annual benchmark that measures how automated outreach turns your attention into someone else’s pipeline.
The overview
Sales automation was supposed to make selling more efficient. It did. For the sender.
For everyone else, it created a new operating condition: a constant layer of legitimate-looking inbound that is unwanted, irrelevant, and not urgent, yet still demands time, judgment, and emotional energy. It is not classic spam. It often comes from real domains and real people. That’s why it works and why it is so hard to stop.
The Graymail Economy Report is Paciva’s annual benchmark on inbound noise across email and professional messaging. Each year, we measure how graymail spreads, what it costs in hours and missed signals, how it changes behavior and trust, and why the next wave of AI-driven outreach will exacerbate the problem unless companies adopt a robust inbound control strategy.
This is not a “productivity” problem. It is an attention market problem. The incentives reward volume, persistence, and manufactured familiarity. Your inbox pays the bill.
The insights
The Inbox Tax: Graymail creates work without permission. It forces daily triage, context switching, and reply pressure that does not move the business forward. The result is a payroll leak that never shows up on a P&L, but shows up everywhere else: delayed decisions, lost momentum, and drained focus.
The Signal Loss Problem: The real damage is not that you delete junk. It is that legitimate messages get buried in it. Deals slow down, customer issues linger, candidates slip through the cracks, and partner opportunities die quietly because the inbox has become a sorting job rather than a communication channel.
The Trust Collapse: As graymail tactics converge with phishing and impersonation patterns, professionals stop trusting inbound by default. That shift is rational, but costly. People engage less, verify more, and assume unknown messages are hostile until proven otherwise. AI makes words cheaper, messages smoother, and cues less meaningful. The result is a colder, noisier, lower-trust market where everyone has to work harder just to be heard.
