An article that appeared on Yahoo!'s Finance blog today found that nearly two-thirds of work e-mails are "non-essential" to business practices:

New research has found that only one in four emails is essential for work. And only 14 percent of work emails were considered critically important.

That means that nearly two-thirds of the emails in your inbox are nonessential for work.  Of those nonessential emails, 11 percent are personal and 7 percent are spam. With more than 60 percent of emails considered nonessential, the potential for email-based viruses and security breaches are top concerns for an organization, according to the research. Increased use of remote and mobile email services only increases the concern.

"What is clear is that the average employee faces a significant challenge in simply processing the information that comes into their inbox and identifying which messages are genuinely business critical," said Nathaniel Borenstein, chief scientist at cloud-based email management firm Mimecast, which conducted the research. "We often end up working for email, rather than having email work for us."

Actually, important research people with glasses that are probably way too thick for them, an essential component of office life is developing a bond with your work homies. A bond that's predicated, often contingent upon, funny e-mails and interesting links.

Many a time--and especially in a job that requires one to do reserach about the productivity of work e-mails--it's the only way to get through the day. Without these so-called "non-essential" emails, I'm pretty sure a decent chunk of the population would not make it to the end of each and every workweek. 

So yea. Whatever you do, be sure not to e-mail out this link. That would be blasphemy.