Surely everyone's prayer! Ridding oneself of all those unread emails.....

This piece "Inbox overflowing? How to survive a deluge of email" in relation to the onslaught of emails and how to deal with an ever-increasing pile of unread ones, ought to resonate with everyone....

"On December 31, I had 46,315 unread emails in my inbox. On my first day back to work in the new year, I had zero.

No, I didn't spend two weeks replying to all those messages. I deleted them - without reading a single one - and declared what is known as email bankruptcy.

People feel the need to include 10 other people on an email just to let them know they are being productive at work.

Am I a bad guy for ignoring those emails? Or are the senders somehow at fault? Probably a bit of both.

For the first time in history, long-distance communication is essentially free. Sure, old-fashioned letters are nice. But few of us need paper and postage stamps for correspondence. We no longer count the minutes on long-distance telephone calls, worrying about the bill. And we certainly don't have to travel - next door or around the world - to communicate with someone.

Email, messaging on social networks and even text messages on services like iMessage cost nothing more than the device we hold in our hand. As a result, we are deluged by messages. There is no escape: Email is probably the most invasive form of communication yet devised.

According to a recent study by the Radicati Group, a technology and market research firm in Palo Alto, California, people send 182 billion emails each day around the world. That adds up to more than 67 trillion messages a year. That's up from 144 billion messages a day in 2012, or 52 trillion messages. The number of active email accounts swelled to 3.9 billion last year from 3.3 billion in 2012. New accounts are expected to grow by 6 per cent in each of the next four years."

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Mahler's Prodigal Son

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