WHEN her computer pinged the arrival of her 30,000th unanswered e-mail, Vanessa Fox dared to fulfil the office worker’s darkest fantasy: she declared “e-mail bankruptcy” and deleted them all.

Fox, an internet strategist for online property company Zillow, said she felt both “terror and relief” as her inbox registered zero for the first time in a decade, then horror as it started filling up again at a rate of 1,000 e-mails a day.

The Seattle-based strategist, who formerly worked for web giant Google, says e-mail overload is a problem she cannot easily solve.

“Anyone working in an office knows the feeling of guilt about not answering all the serious e-mails,” said Fox, 35.

“My reaction was pretty extreme, but at least it bought me some time to figure out what to do next. E-mail was a fantastic invention but now, even without spam, it’s a nightmare to deal with.”

Fox is not alone in damming the e-mail flood. The Friday before last, 150 engineers at the chipmaker Intel turned off their e-mail systems for 24 hours, opting to talk to people by telephone instead.

Intel said the company would run “zero e-mail Fridays” for the next month, then decide whether the initiative improved the flow of ideas and made people happier.

One Intel engineer said it was scary. “People were sneaking looks at their BlackBerries,” he said. “But after a few hours just talking to people face to face or on the phone, you realise it’s like being addicted to junk food – you can live without it. My wife had to unplug the home PC to prevent me logging on on Saturday morning to catch up. My nerves were jangling.”

The tension proved too much at another high-tech firm, US Cellular, where several workers said they could not stop pressing the send button.

Rebels were fined $1 (50p), had “wanted” posters put up on their office walls and were required to wear nametags with a scarlet letter “E” on them.

One office worker said it had at least helped him cut down his “e-mailage” by a fifth.

Other large firms, such as the accountants Deloitte & Touche and Georgia-based mail order company PBD Worldwide, have also asked employees to “talk, not type” for one day a week.

At Pennsylvania State University last week, students normally addicted to “poking” or “tweeting” each other with brief messages are pledging to take a day off.

Mary Kanaskie, a columnist on the university paper, said students were getting panic attacks from trying to keep up with the volume of e-mails.

“E-mail is great for shouting out a ‘howdy’ to grandma or making a business deal in China, but we shouldn’t rely on it for everything. That’s why I’m declaring my own e-mail-free Fridays,” she said.

The number of e-mails zapping around the world has multiplied fivefold since 2000. The research company IDC estimates that each day computers send out 40 billion personal e-mails, 17 billion automated alerts and 40 billion spam messages.

The average American office worker receives about 140 e-mails a day, but rarely manages to read half of them or respond to more than a quarter.

Ploys to deal with the blight of e-mail include setting aside a certain time of day to deal with them and responding only to the most urgent.

The worst habit is “e-mail twitching”, or reading every new mail as it arrives, said Timothy Ferriss, author of The Four-Hour Workweek, but it is difficult to give up.

“Maybe the only way to escape is to get rich enough that someone else reads your e-mails for you,” he said.

Read Vanessa Fox's blog

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