ALSO CALLED: Email Administration, e-Mail Management, Email Response Management, Mailbox Management, e-Mail Response Management, Electronic Mail Management, and e-Mail Administration
DEFINITION: Email bankruptcy is an acknowledgement that your email has become unmanageable and the decision to either purge your inbox and start afresh or, more radically, to renounce email altogether.

The origins of email bankruptcy as a term are not clear. One of the earliest examples of the practice, whether identified as such or not, was by Stanford computer science professor Donald E. Knuth. Knuth was  … 
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EMAIL MANAGEMENT DEFINITION (continued): …  an early adopter of email, in 1975. However, he gave it up 15 years later. Quoted in an article in The Washington Post, Knuth explained "I'd get to work and start answering e-mail -- three hours later, I'd say, 'Oh, what was I supposed to do today?'" He took the extreme route and simply stopped using email and has never regretted his decision, proclaiming that "I have been a happy man since Jan. 1 , 1990."

Creative Commons founder, law professor and Wired columnist Larry Lessig popularized the term and concept when he officially declared email … 
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