The revolution started on a Friday. In a greyish building on a sprawling business park outside the southern English provincial town of Watford, a maverick executive at the offices of Camelot, the British national lottery operator, issued a startling edict: no more emails on the last day of the working week unless absolutely necessary.

No pointless cc-ing of irrelevant memos; no links to "comedy" websites intended to amuse; no electronic invitations to the pub after work. Staff, it seemed, were forgetting how to talk to each other.

"If there were elements of the business where you could talk face to face instead of sending an email, we wanted to encourage people to do that," said a Camelot spokeswoman.

Four weeks later, the experiment came to an end. The company is "still in the process of reviewing the results", but it is hard to imagine that the initiative will prove to have been anything but a triumphantly futile gesture.

According to a survey published in Britain last week, we are at risk of drowning in e-mail, struggling to keep our heads above the virtual water as 6.1 billion electronic messages slosh daily around the planet and, as a result, we are turning against it as never before.

In Australia, a survey in March of 100 websites by online research consultancy APT Strategies, found that one-third of e-mails were not answered within 24 hours.

E-mail has allowed the pressure to communicate directly to go all the way to the top of an organisation. APT's managing director Marc Phillips, conservatively estimates that chief executives receive about 60 e-mails a day.

"The CEO is more accessible," he says. "Customer/stakeholder accountability has most definitely risen."

Of greater interest, he thinks, is the frequency of instant messaging; it has grown in Australia by 200 per cent over the past three years, a growth rate that is expected to continue.

In Britain, the UK Consumers' Association found that the number of people who named e-mail as their favorite form of communication had plummeted in the space of a year, from 14 per cent to five per cent. Meanwhile, the numbers who preferred face-to-face meetings jumped from 39 per cent to 67 per cent.

Old-fashioned "snail mail", other reports show, is holding up well, too diminishing as a percentage of all communications, but growing in volume by two per cent a year worldwide.

We used to be able to dismiss the spectre of information overload as a fantasy of panicky luddites. In 1998 - when office workers were beginning to hyperventilate at receiving a mere 20 or 30 e-mails a day - a typical survey of the British working population noted, in a tone of calm reassurance, that "e-mail volume is by no means as heavy as many scaremongers lead people to believe".

But that was three years ago, when the idea of connecting to the Internet on a train through a laptop connected to a cellphone, or through Blackberrys - the nifty, pocketsized emailchecker that combines keyboard, screen and wireless dialer, now de rigueur in what remains of Silicon Valley - was barely credible.

Now, plans are afoot to facilitate e-mail-checking via cellphones in the tunnels of the New York subway, and the London Underground Railway network has promised (threatened?) the same.

Pollsters Mori undertook a similar survey earlier this year, and reached a somewhat different conclusion: "We are fast heading for e-mail burnout!"

It turns out that we fell, once again, for the myth of technological replacement. "The original promise was that the new technologies would substitute for the old," says Steve Woolgar, a sociologist of the Internet at Oxford University.

"They don't. They just sit alongside the ongoing means of communication, and it's compounded, because one medium stimulates the other. The more you do none-mail things, the more e-mail you send.

"So everyone talks about being a member of a different kind of community through email, but then you find people deleting 60 to 70 per cent of the e-mails they receive on the basis of the subject line alone."

More and more of us are becoming victims of what psychologist David Lewis calls "information fatigue syndrome". Symptoms include exhaustion, anxiety, failure of memory and shortness of attention in the face of the onrush of facts. "Having too much information can be as dangerous as having too little," Lewis says.

Mark Whitby isn't quite there yet, but he knows how it might feel. The 36-year-old British sales manager for Intel, the dominant multinational manufacturer of computer chips, receives about 100 e-mails on a busy day, and copes by never switching off. "When I started I was getting two or three e-mails a day, but it's exploded in the past five years," he says. "Now, I'll manage my e-mail on the train, on the plane, or download before I leave home, and read and reply on the move. We're trying very hard to cut down on using e-mail for small talk, for gossip, for things you could walk over to somebody's desk and say."

If our brains did not evolve for this, neither did our businesses. The average workplace was designed on the assumption that information is a scarce resource, but now it is too plentiful, and instead we need filters.

Inevitably, Microsoft researchers are working on their answer to this problem, a "digital butler" which will sort and prioritise messages.

At first, the unfiltered nature of e-mail promised an unprecedented democratisation in communications. In the early years of widespread e-mail use, an e-mail often reached even the managing director directly but now, increasing numbers of senior managers are having their secretaries open their e-mail. So, if you send something to the chief executive, much as there's a public perception that this person is available, he's not really going to read them.

"Not being accessible generates a powerful symbolic sense of value," says David Owens, a professor at Vanderbilt University, in Tennessee, who receives more than 70 e-mails most days during a term. "But the rest of us are going to have to work out some quick ways to filter. If I get an e-mail and I see that the sender's address is webtv.com, well, I'm not going to pay much attention.

"But if it's from Bill Gates, you know, I'm probably going to read it ... there is a real struggle here. It's great to have an infinite number of connections, but that's also the problem - you have an infinite number of connections." (There are more mundane obstacles, too. "I can't give my password to my secretary to check my e-mail, because the IT administrators told me I couldn't," Owens says.)

But long before our brains or our organisational systems buckle and die with the stress of knowing too much, it may be the physical stuff on which the Internet relies - the servers and wires and switches - that gives out first. At least until broadband and fibreoptic technologies are far more widespread, we are facing meltdown.

The tale of the schoolteacher who has his class send a chain e-mail around the world, asking recipients to reply to it and to forward it in order to show the power of the medium, is an often-recurring piece of Internet folklore. The school's e-mail system - and that of the entire local education authority - usually holds up for a day or two before collapsing under the weight of the replies.

- THE GUARDIAN