After being away, then the inevitable catchup, I looked at my inbox and despaired, 600+ emails.
99% of them rubbish or unimportant. After clearing out my inbox I then had to catchup on a new project I've been working on, but the emails still pour through.
So for the next week I put another out of office simply saying I'm busy, if it's urgent please contact our customer services, or if it's critical, please phone me. Otherwise I'll respond as and when I get a chance over the coming weeks.
Over that week I think I got 2 phone calls, proving nothing much was particularly urgent and left me to concentrate on some work.
I'm now tempted to scrap email altogether, or just leave a sorry I'm busy message. As a business tool, I think email has now lost it's way and is actually counter productive.