How Broken is Email?

Email, which started as a transformation in the history of communication, seems to be close to a complete breakdown. Do any of you not struggle to find the nuggets of important information amidst the noise? How often do you send an important message via email and have to follow up via text or phone to find out if it got through? I don't know what will come next, but it's depressing to see where we are now.

Just to illustrate - this is ONE DAY'S WORTH of the spam collected for my campus email account. True, the spam filter caught all these messages, but a) occasionally there's a false positive, so I miss something important b) dozens of crap messages get through every day and c) my campus spends A LOT OF MONEY for the hardware and software that does the filtering.

So when our students tell us that they don't read email or read it only under duress because we tell them we have to - maybe they have already figured out something we don't seem to know yet.