I HAVE come to the sad conclusion that email is a modern day curse and not the great asset it was designed to be.

Every working day, I spend a massive amount of time sifting through piles of electronic messages that fly in to my computer.

It's almost a full-time job looking through them. If I go away for just one day, there's normally a build-up of around 200 notes.

Some of them are irrelevant and can be ditched, but others contain important memos from colleagues. Meanwhile, a few of them actually are the basis of great leads for big stories.

Unfortunately, it's really difficult to tell until you've read everything and opened all the various attachments. On several occasions, I've almost missed a mom-entous story because there's so much chaff to wade through.

Private users of PCs may not quite understand this phenomenon, but other business leaders surely do.

The problem is that email makes it easy for everyone and anyone to send a message. A few simple taps on the keyboard and it's gone.

And what's more, most people expect an immediate reply because the medium is so easy to use.

The worst culprits are the people who insist on ccing their messages to everyone else they can think of.

In the old pre-email days, people used to write letters using a pen, paper, an envelope and a stamp. Yes, it did take longer to reply to these, but there were fewer of them and somehow they were easier to track. You sent letters sparingly and it meant something when you posted them.

But literally any old Tom, Dick or Harry can roll out of bed, turn on their computer and send communications to all and sundry before breakfast.

And what's worse still, no one seems to care about grammar. I have applications from would-be reporters with the most atrocious spelling mistakes such as: "I was wadering if you had a job." This wouldn't have happened so often on snail mail because they would have taken more care.

Yet, it's infectious. I fire off replies as quickly as possible and return later to discover I've spelt my name wrong because I pressed the wrong key. It's harder to pick up errors through the glare of the computer screen than it is on a piece of white writing paper.

I could spend the entire week replying to emails. It would be useless to hire a PA to do the job, because most of them require personal replies.

I suppose this column is a giant apology to anyone I've ignored or who I've sent an unintelligible reply to electronically.

I went back through the archives and found I'd penned a similar piece five years ago. But it wasn't quite so bad then. In those days, the curse was junk mail.

For the most part, that seems to have been filtered out. But it's been replaced by a relentless tide of irrelevant ccs.

Please don't take this as a request to stop communicating. I want your letters, complaints and stories, and email is the quickest way to send this material.

All I would ask is that people treat emails in the way they would the conventional letter. Whenever you are writing to someone outside your immediate circle, stop and think about what you are saying and check it carefully for accuracy and spelling. And only cc it to people it needs to go to.

If you give it the care you'd show to a letter, you will likely get the response you are seeking.

Emails were intended to speed things up; but they are having the opposite effect. And the system will grind to a halt under a mountain of unread messages if people don't treat them more seriously.