  In [3] S. J. Bhatt and H. V. Dedania exposed certain classes of Banach
algebras in which every element is a topological divisor of zero. We identify a
new (large) class of Banach algebras with the aforementioned property, namely,
the class of non-unital Banach algebras which admits either an approximate
identity or approximate units. This also leads to improvements of results by R.
J. Loy and J. Wichmann, respectively. If we observe that every single example
that appears in [3] belongs to the class identified in the current paper, and,
moreover, that many of them are classical examples of Banach algebras with this
property, then it is tempting to conjecture that the classes exposed in [3]
must be contained in the class that we have identified here. However, we show
somewhat elusive counterexamples. Furthermore, we investigate the role
completeness plays in the results and show, by giving a suitable example, that
the assumptions are not superfluous. The ideas considered here also yields a
pleasing characterization: The socle of a semisimple Banach algebra is
infinite-dimensional if and only if every socle-element is a topological
divisor of zero in the socle.
