Email works remarkably well when you can easily control who gets your address. It works absolutely abysmally for anyone who gets subjected to a constant deluge

Email works remarkably well when you can easily control who gets your address. It works absolutely abysmally for anyone who gets subjected to a constant deluge of random semi-reasonable emails from unknown senders. Some are outright spam, some are actually legitimate professional inquiries, and some are a blend between the two. I think fundamentally the problem is that email works great if you aren't the subject of a random influx. If you create an address and never tell anyone except a handful of good sites, you're okay! If your address is everywhere, ends up in a data breach, or ends up on a marketing list for "important business people / decision makers to try to pitch products to" then you're in for a much different experience. Why not just use filters? It's truly random who sends what when. The only email provider that I truly appreciate is HEY, which has deny-by-default email. You explicitly allow people to contact you, which is a different and very nice approach. It has other problems, though, which make it hard for me to suggest it as a solution.