France is that much closer to becoming the first country to ban after-work emails. The country's lower parliamentary house passed a bill this week that would ban companies with 50 or more employees from sending emails outside regular work hours, BBC News reported. It now goes to the Senate, where members will study it before sending it back to the National Assembly to enshrine it in French law.

The bill would make businesses come up with hours during which employees cannot check or send emails. And it comes as workers are finding it increasingly difficult to detach themselves from work, Socialist MP Benoit Hamon told BBC News. "Employees physically leave the office, but they do not leave their work," he said. "They remain attached by a kind of electronic leash — like a dog. The texts, the messages, the emails — they colonize the life of the individual to the point where he or she eventually breaks down."

The bill marks the closest that any country has come to regulating after-work email. Two years ago, German Employment Minister Andrea Nahles looked into legislation that would limit the use of email outside work, but no such law was ever passed, The Guardian reported. And while France's proposed law is being praised in some quarters, others don't feel that it will solve the problem of work-related stress. "I think the topic of work-related well-being is much larger than simply stopping email after-hours." Workers might become anxious at a flood of emails they have to check in the morning, Gillian Symon and Jon Whittle, researchers at a U.K. project looking at how digital technology affects the work-life balance, told The Washington Post. "I think the topic of work-related well-being is much larger than simply stopping email after-hours," Whittle said. "Email is just a medium used to communicate. The real problem is the culture of having to constantly do more and constantly do better than competitors."