I think that's the point of the article too. If you are not prepared to handle 1% auto-responder rate which you can weed out which some code; you are sending too many emails.
I do, and it isn't a problem. If you have the people needed to handle thousands of emails from customers a day, those same people can very easily filter a couple of hundred automated emails.
What actually is more of a problem is spam and unsolicited non-customer email. But still, it takes half a second to close them.