this is called setting up filters, there's no trick to it, it's pretty simple to set up filter and ignore people you don't want to respond to. 7000 is 22 a day, assuming a 6 day work week, that's pretty low volume to handle, I would venture to say that you could probably manage to read more than 9 emails a day (40% of 22)

People feeling like they have to apologize sounds like you've made people feel guilty for emailing you. I can't help but find the whole comment a little self important and pretentious. You have time to fritter on hn, yet manage to only read 9 emails a day and reply to 3 a day, that's pretty lame. If you worked at my company and managed that, I'd have to let you go.