Nobody famous ever contributes to forums. This is a law of the universe. However, emails are an area where something better could be done. Imagine if you were

Nobody famous ever contributes to forums. This is a law of the universe. However, emails are an area where something better could be done. Imagine if you were a famous person and you had a definite idea of who you wanted to hear from. Friends and family would be whitelisted. Amazon too. Everyone else could then be spam filtered to 'reject' or 'discard' their emails. At the server level you could reject everything in a foreign language. Or with an attachment. You could also have your own stop words. So Eno could have 'Music For Airports' as a phrase that triggered the response 'no, sorry mate, thanks for writing though'. Now what would happen if people did get stock 'don't bother' emails? If they were well written and had some politeness to them then I think people would prefer that to 'well, he never replied, sob, sob...'. It is about using a customer service ethos, which could be hard to imagine if you are a famous person and therefore centre of the known universe. There is an aspect of 'proof of work' with email as it is. DMARC is a thing, reverse PTR checks and everything else an email has to get right shows that your email has at least tried. There are also 'header checks' for proof of identity. Right now, if some producer at the BBC needed Eno to star on Desert Island Discs then they would be able to contact Eno's agent, give their BBC email address and title, then get a yes or no straightaway. In this the 'proof of work' would be going through the agent who would obviously think 'yeah, Brian would like that' to forward on the enquiry. They would check the person was from the BBC and it would all be good. Heck, they would probably know the producer anyway and the producer would have LinkedIn and other credentials. The agent might not be replaceable by a postfix main.cf/master.cf configuration but it must be possible to get something better than anonymity. I also think that emails received - even if never replied to - is an important metric. Imagine you thought you were really famous and that everyone was wanting to email you for that to not actually be the case.