"E-MAIL has become the bane of some people’s professional lives. Michael Arrington, the founder of TechCrunch,
a blog covering new Internet companies, last month stared balefully at his inbox,
with 2,433 unread e-mail messages, not counting 721 messages awaiting his attention in Facebook.
Mr. Arrington might be tempted to purge his inbox and start afresh — the phrase “e-mail bankruptcy” has been with us since at least 2002.
But he declares e-mail bankruptcy regularly, to no avail. New messages swiftly replace those that are deleted unread",
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/technology/20digi.html