With the enormous output of mails some participants produce here and the impossibility of reading all of them, important arguments can be overlooked easily. On top of that, the arguments of members who don't have the time to write a dozen or more e-mails per day are sometimes drowned out by an overly productive minority.
It's called "skimming". You skim an e-mail to see if you care at all. If you don't, just delete it and move on. While it may not be possible to read all the e-mails, it's certainly possible to skim all of them.
And, if you've gotten tired of a particular thread or person, you can just stop all of those particular e-mails.
I've sure heard about that delete button but I think it can't replace a sound culture of discussion. In an oral conversation you can't talk 80% of the time. Here, I sometimes get the impression that some people believe the more (and the longer) e-mails they write, the more right they are.
And who might that be? I think it has more with a desire to respond to ALL the messages on a topic, rather than a belief that more e-mails makes you more right, which it obviously does not.
Mark
PS
Geritt said something earlier, presumably jokingly, about an all-caps signature. The purpose of that is that miniscule letters were not used in ancient Rome. Thus, "QVANTUM" in my signature rather than "Quantum". I'm pretty sure that in situations like that (ie, sociolinguistic authenticity), all-caps are considered acceptable by the general public.