Is it ok not to reply to people?

Asking for a friend

I have three inboxes, LinkedIn messages, and Instagram DMs on three accounts to check daily. That’s excluding the Facebook messenger, Hotmail, Gmail and iCloud inboxes which I have ignored for about 10 years. I don’t even know how many messages I receive a day (I don’t have the time to count), but it’s multiple hundreds. I try my best to keep up with the constant communication onslaught, but it’s a struggle. I even find that I avoid going back to friends and family (who I do actually want to converse with), because my response battery gets so depleted by the end of the day. So, for 2024, I am thinking of adopting a new approach… just not. If I could add in a poll here, I would genuinely love to know how people feel about the etiquette of emails. Are there different rules around the messages that are unsolicited versus those that are not? Is it ok to ignore people? For example, in my world, email traffic falls into different categories:

Crucial - messages from clients paying us to do a job. Team members that require support.

Essential - suppliers that require answers to progress.

Of interest - could be unsolicited, however relevant and of interest emails from people you potentially know or know of.

Not now - emails about things that could be of interest, but aren’t top of mind.

Irrelevant - unsolicited emails that aren’t of interest. Ironically, these seem to be the ones most heavily chased up.

We have a few email rules in my communications business. One of them being that we don’t follow up with media on pitches, unless we have something new to share with them that we genuinely think could be of interest. Personally, I don’t like being chased multiple times on email for something that I am not interested in.

So what is the consensus on all of this? Is it ok to just delete emails that don’t fall into the priority categories, or, should we adopt the perhaps more polite process of replying to say, even when things aren’t of interest to us?

Let me know your vote. Just don’t send me an email (joking!).