Swamped by an unmanageable number of messages — the volume of e-mail traffic has nearly doubled in the past two years — and plagued by annoying spam and viruses, some users are saying “Enough!” and declaring “e-mail bankruptcy.”

The term “e-mail bankruptcy” may have been coined in 1999 Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor Sherry Turkle, who said she came up with the concept after researching e-mail and discovering that some people harbor fantasies about escaping their e-mail burden.