oof you are a silly sausage. As I write my unread email pile is 27773 - I've got it as high as 32000 - but then I needed to delete a few to free up space- I won't be reading or responding to the majority of them.
I guess you don't work in academia - academics, administrators and managers - will send you 100's of verbose emails a day - its not possible to read them all, nor formulate responses.
Its generally mega span. Academics particularly in the current climate are not lazy, we are hugely overworked and most of work well above and beyond our contracted hours. We have to prioritise and don't have time to respond to every email enquiry.
My strategy is I'll read the email (and possibly respond) if its from a trusted sender- e,g a person who doesn't typically time waste.... Plenty of people are on my ignore list for the same reasons... nothing good ever comes from reading their emails.
If the thing is actually important the person will either hunt me down in person or send enough emails for me to eventually respond. This cuts out a lot of the spam... e.g speak to me directly or I'll ignore you.
Generally works fine - department management are so dysfunctional they are not aware about what I'm doing day to day and don't seem to notice wether I respond to emails or not.
Don't think working in HE is a career..... its not, its a thing to be survived, we eek out small wins in the attempt to preserve our sanity... I have not desire to be "professional" - I'm just doing the bare minimum, enough not to get fired...