Ed, you are correct. I am not suggesting in my blog that we answer each and every e-mail that drops into our inboxes. For example, as a tech writer and journalist, I receive hundreds of press releases per week. There's no way I can answer each sender and I think these account execs know that I will reply if I'm interested. What I am writing about is a message sent by one person to another person with a specific request or issue that needs to be addressed. I am amazed and appalled by how many of these notes go unanswered. Or, how, after an initial note back and forth, someone goes completely off the radar. I suspect this is why so many people cc others within an organization. It's not just to keep them in the loop. It's to light a fire and increase the odds of a reply.

Tell me about it. So many times I've sent a simple question and been ignored just to have to call them on the phone, come to their office, or run into them in the hallway.

Why do people take a question communicated over e-mail so much less seriously? I'm going to bug you until I get an answer one way or another, and by answering via e-mail I'm enabling you to do it on your own time, rather then whenever I decide to call you and interrupt whatever you're doing.

Then there is the fact that if down the line I forget some detail I could refer to your e-mail, rather then call or bug you in person all over again.

@ Sam: Very true about the CC aspect of emails- love the phrase- "lighting a fire" I have observed that a mail with others on CC gets responses on time or earlier , possibly due to the information request becoming public.
Looking at the fast rise and fall of orkut and the increasing number of friends on FB who are shutting off pointless notifications of whose farm grew what in which ville... I am coming to the conclusion that despite the spam on emails- its the most non obtrusive , yet compelling communication medium and would be here to stay.

With regard to vlad's comment about the "staggering" cost of IBM's Watson, having just paid my son's college tuition bill I can tell you that the cost of preparing a "carbon unit" to be a Jeopary contestant is comparably staggering!

Here is another perspective... Years ago as a new hire at a large company I went through their new employee orientation. One of the topics was work load. Basically, they said you will be presented with more work than you can address and that you need to be effective at evaluating the value of the tasks and work on the high value items first. They used an analogy of white ($1), red ($5), and blue ($10) poker chips on a table; the goal was to scoop up all of the blue chips first; everyone in the training was given a blue poker chip as a reminder.

The recommendation made at the training was that - if you had to make a choice - ignore the low value items. This could equate to a request for information or the execution of some task. One of two things would then happen as a result of this inaction on your part. The first possibility was that a follow up request would be made - which could indicate the task may be more important than you estimated, so you should probably work to addresses it. The second possibility was that you would not hear about it again, which could mean that the need for the task resolved itself without your involvement or that the requestor forgot about it because it was not that important in the first place; in either case it was not a necessary task for you to address and you made the right choice in how to allocate your time.

So, the unanswered communications you are concerned about could be the result of a filtering process by busy people making an effort to effectively utilize their limited time.