Correction Appended

EVEN in his sleep, Stever Robbins, an executive adviser, could not escape his e-mail. "I was buried under a pile of e-mail," Mr. Robbins, 41, said. "I can't remember ever having a nightmare. For my first nightmare to be about e-mail, that was pathetic."

In his waking life, at the consulting company where he worked, Mr. Robbins sometimes had to troll through 120 e-mail messages a day, many of them from his boss. "By the time I got done triaging the e-mail, I didn't have energy to do the rest of the work," Mr. Robbins said.

So Mr. Robbins sent his boss and colleagues a series of recommendations about changing their e-mail ways. When the suggestions were ignored, Mr. Robbins quit his job and went into business for himself, helping executives improve their job performance. High on his list of priorities was helping them wrestle down their e-mail.

"I quit my job because of the stress, and it had almost everything to do with e-mail," he said.

It was not so long ago that e-mail dashed around the world with abundant good cheer, prompting people to race to the keyboard with anticipation, punctuate their sign-offs with smiley faces or TTYL (talk to you later) and express general wonderment at how life was ever lived before the in-box was invented.