Today marks the 40th birthday of email, which makes it a shallow, flirty, intellectual Gemini. In 1971 Engineer Ray Tomlinson sent an email from one computer to another sitting right beside him. The message was thought to have read "QWERTYUIOP".

Forty years later and research by Sky Broadband shows that 91 per cent of Britons own an email account, with the average person sending 24 emails per day. More than half of the population hasn’t sent a handwritten letter in over six months and more than half would rather send an email than pick up the phone.

A quarter of naughty Brits said that they would panic if their boss could see all of their sent emails and one in every ten email users has used email to flirt. More than 21 per cent of people access emails on the move from our mobile phone handsets.

The research also asked respondents to reveal what they couldn’t live without. Broadband internet polled highest every time, beating chocolate, alcohol, sex and even mobile phones to the top spot. Quizzed on why having broadband internet at home was beneficial, top of the list was saving time (78%) and making life easier (70%).