London, Mar 10 : Emails were once touted as the biggest office tool, facilitating smooth and timely co-ordination within and outside the office. But it is now claimed that emails eat up huge amounts of work time.

Research firm the Radicati Group has claimed that today, an average employee wastes almost 90 minutes to two hours per day scanning through hundreds of emails, a chunk of which is spam and junk mail.

Their results have indicated the worldwide email traffic to be 196 billion messages a day. And it has been predicted to touch 374 billion per day by 2011.

According to Jason Preston, of the Parnassus Group, a social media consultancy, employees have been so much flooded with messages that email had become a "broken business tool" in urgent need of fixing.

"There's been no innovation to separate the junk letters from the real ones," Telegraph quoted him, as saying.

In fact, there are firms, which held "no email days" to persuade staff to opt for the phone or talk to each other instead. (ANI)