My new boss doesn't tend to use Subject: for his emails, so I had to change my email filters to keep from trashing his work-related emails.

Last time I used software that displayed number of spam-trashed messages, I was getting, oh, about 10,000 per day, literally.

That was over a year ago, and I've since switched to different filtering, different client etc, so I've got NO IDEA how many emails get sent to me that I never read.

I'm sure some of them are real email I actually would have wanted.

This is only going to get worse, not better.

I can educate the people I know who send me email that shouldn't have, to a large degree.

I even got my sister to stop sharing the really good (sic) chain-mail-humor emails she sometimes gets.

If a "friend" turns out to be truly uneducable in this regard, well, I'll just filter their email into Trash and tell them I no longer have email.

But somebody else is gonna have to solve the problem of the junk-mailers, or email will become useless.

Things I've already given up:
eBay: can't tell real from fake, can't bid/pay timely fashion, can't use.
PayPal: ditto.
Amazon: ditto, plus they spammed me. Plus they want to charge me $40/year when they don't manage to sell my stuff at a rate to sustain that.
Real: They spammed me, I won't use their software. Plus their software sucks. As does their whole attitude towards sales/free software.

I suspect I'll be migrating more and more real communication with people I want AWAY from email.

The first thing to go will probably be change requests for the zillion websites I maintain.

My Inbox is not the right place for that, any more. Which is a shame, as it worked quite well for many many years.

I believe email communication is pretty much doomed, in the long run, if the signal/noise ratio cannot be turned around within a few years.

The spam volume is increasing exponentially. The real email is not. Do the math.