Thinking of taking a long holiday vacation? Well, don't be surprised if there are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of e-mails waiting for you upon your return. Different people have different strategies for coping with this holiday nuisance says The New York Times, which interviews a number of New York office workers about their e-mail habits.

A professor at Rutgers explains the dilemma of holiday e-mail: "Today's reliance on e-mail has changed the nature of vacation. If you do clean your in-box, you're defeating the purpose of vacation, which is to get away from the office and do something different. If you don't, you have to work twice as hard when you come back. And while you are responding to those, new ones come flooding in. In some ways, you are punished for taking vacation, by out-of-control e-mails."