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In a little over 20 years it has grown into one of the dominant forms of communication with more than 100 billion email messages sent every day.

But it seems the convenience and immediacy of email really is destroying the art of conversation and the written word.

In the largest ever systematic study of emails - examining more than 16 billion messages - researchers have found that most people send replies containing just five words.

As we spend more time online our communications are getting faster but also appear to be getting shorter with many emails containing just five words, according to new research. The study examined the emails sent by two million Yahoo users over a period of several months

The study, which was conducted by researchers at Yahoo Labs and the University of Southern California, also found that our email habits also follow remarkable patterns.

Replies become faster as the conversation progresses, but the researchers found they could tell when a email thread was about to end as the last reply was much slower than the previous replies.

'The long delay in a reply could be considered as a signal for the end of the conversation,' said the researchers, led by Farshad Kooti, a computer scientist at the University of Southern California.

The study examined the emails sent by two million Yahoo users over a period of several months.

They found that on average younger people tend to spend less time composing an email - with a reply time of around 13 minutes on average for teenagers.

Young adults take 16 minutes, while those aged 36 to 50 years old spend around 24 minutes before sending their reply.

Those older than 50 seem to take the longest - 47 minutes - perhaps due to their lower familiarity with the technology but also because they tend to send longer replies.

The study found that more than half of the replies sent in response to an initial email were shorter than 43 words.

Teenagers, however, tended to send replies of around 17 words, while mature users wrote about 40 words.

It is a stark contrast to the length of handwritten letters that often stretched over several pages in the days of the traditional mail.

However, the research also suggests older people tend to spend more time considering their words.

For a reply of around 50 words, teenagers were found to spend 39 minutes before sending their response, while mature users spent 79 minutes.

This of course could also be due in part to the level of connectivity that younger people tend to enjoy over their older counterparts.

The graphs above show the length of time it takes to reply decreases as a conversation continues until the final message when it increases dramatically (a) while the length of the reply drops on the final message (b)

Older email users above the age of 50 years old tended to spend more time composing their messages. Teenagers tended to send replies of around 17 words, while mature users wrote about 40 words

The researchers also found that those who send replies using mobile devices tended to give shorter responses, while men also sent fewer words.

However the study additionally found that around 30 per cent of emails sent were over 100 words long.

Writing in a paper posted on the open source site arxiv.org, the Mr Kooti and his colleagues said: 'We found that users reply faster to emails received during weekdays and working hours, and that replies tend to become shorter later in the day and on weekends.

'In regard to demographics, younger users generally send faster and shorter replies, and men send slightly faster and shorter replies than women.'

Yahoo has more than 300 million users but the researchers studied only those who had agreed to take part in such research, and those who had exchanged more than five emails with other contacts.

The group examined the sender ID, receiver ID, time sent, subject, the body of the email, and number of attachments.

The graph on the left shows how users are unable to keep pace with the number of emails they receive in a day compared to the number they send. Graph on the right shows the probability distribution of email length

However, to extract statistics from the email bodies the information was anonymised and analysis conducted by computer.

The researchers also attempted to avoid the effect of spam by analysing emails exchanges that occurred between two users.

However, the researchers found that as the number of emails we receive goes up, the percentage they are able to reply to goes down - suggesting we are becoming overwhelmed.

They said: 'We found that users increased their activity as they received more emails, but not enough to compensate for the higher load.

'This means that as users became more overloaded, they replied to a smaller fraction of incoming emails and with shorter replies.'