[GoodIntentions]

I see people in this discussion getting wrapped up about manners and expectations. What I'd like to contribute is this:

I think in a position that attracts a pile of daily email, you need to be able to triage what you read, saving some ( hopefully few mails ) for later detailed reply, ignoring junk and hammering out a pile of short acknowledgements as you go. It doesn't take much more time to hit reply with "Thanks, go it, will process as time allows" or similar. If you don't do this, you're treating it as junk mail in my opinion and robbing the sender of any acknowledgement. If you've _got_ to ignore valid mails in this fashion, it points to some other workload related issue.