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On Dec. 31, I had 46,315 unread emails in my inbox. On my first day back to work in the new year, I had zero.

No, I didn’t spend two weeks replying to all those messages. I deleted them — without reading a single one — and declared what is known as email bankruptcy.

Am I a bad guy for ignoring those emails? Or are the senders somehow at fault? Probably a bit of both.

For the first time in history, long-distance communication is essentially free. Sure, old-fashioned letters are nice. But few of us need paper and postage stamps for correspondence. We no longer count the minutes on long-distance telephone calls, worrying about the bill. And we certainly don’t have to travel — next door or around the world — to communicate with someone.

Email, messaging on social networks and even text messages on services like iMessages cost nothing more than the device we hold in our hand. As a result, we are deluged by messages. There is no escape: Email is probably most invasive form of communication yet devised.

According to a recent study by the Radicati Group, a technology and market research firm in Palo Alto, Calif, people send 182 billion emails each day around the world. That adds up to more than 67 trillion messages a year. That’s up from 144 billion messages a day in 2012, or 52 trillion messages. The number of active email accounts swelled to 3.9 billion last year from 3.3 billion in 2012. New accounts are expected to grow by 6 percent in each of the next four years.

Billions, trillions — it won’t be long before we’re referring to emails in terms of quadrillions.

“It’s behavioral economics 101,” said Clive Thompson, author of a new book, “Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better” and an occasional contributor to The New York Times Magazine. “You make it easy for people to do something, they will do more of it.”

Studies have shown that all this email leads to an unproductive and anxiety-ridden workplace, said Gloria Mark, an informatics professor at the University of California, Irvine, who has been studying the effects of email in the workplace since 2004. Ms. Mark’s research has found that people who stopped using email at work felt less stress and were more focused and productive.

Mr. Thompson said that in the workplace, email had become a major barrier of efficiency. “People feel the need to include 10 other people on an email just to let them know they are being productive at work,” he said. “But as a result, it ends up making those other 10 people unproductive because they have to manage that email.”

A number of start-ups are trying to solve the problems that come with the mountains of messages. But those that offer the slightest respite are often bought before they become mainstream products.

Last year, Mailbox, which made a “smart inbox,” was sold to Dropbox for an estimated $100 million. Yahoo bought the smart email start-up Xobni — the name is “inbox” spelled backward — for $48 million last year. And in 2012, Google acquired Sparrow, an intelligent mailbox app, for an estimated $25 million.

Branko Cerny, founder of SquareOne, which bills itself as a stress-free email client, said that technology could help solve the problems of email on the receiving end, which SquareOne does by presorting and flagging important messages, but that only human awareness could stop senders from inundating us.

In the past, with physical letters, people put thought into what they were going to write before they sent it, Mr. Cerny said. With digital, it’s send first, think later.

Google sent shudders down many people’s spines last week when it said it would soon let people send anyone an email, even if they did not have the person’s email address, as long as both people had a Gmail and Google Plus account.

Some people have come up with their own solutions to the problems email presents. Luis Suarez, lead social business enabler for IBM, decided to take on his inbox several years ago, and by all accounts seems to have won.

He said he had moved most of his communication to public and social platforms. When people contact Mr. Suarez by email, unaware that he is not a fan of that route, he scans their email signature for a social network they use and then responds in a public forum, whether on Twitter, Google Plus or LinkedIn. This way, he says, he can deal with several messages at once.

Over the last few years, he has managed to get his inbox down by 98 percent. He rarely uses email anymore.

“If email was invented today, it probably would not have survived as a technology,” Mr. Suarez said. “Social and public sites are much more efficient.”

For those who can’t seem to handle the onslaught of email, there is always the extreme option. When messages pile up, select all, hit delete, and declare email bankruptcy.

Email: bilton@nytimes.com. Twitter: @nickbilton