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Monica Seeley, a visiting fellow at the management school at Imperial College, London, has written a book on email and the difference between the sexes.

Dr Seeley believes that email messages from men are short and often abrupt one-liners while women agonise over the impact of their longer messages before sending them.

Her forthcoming book, Managing in the World of Email - published by Gower later this year - also argues that the more emails you receive, the more successful you are perceived to be.

To play office politics effectively, those with overflowing inboxes should advertise the fact to colleagues and bemoan the time spent dealing with them. Which, in the world of academia, should prove a doddle.