So the line between evil spammers, and normal spammers seems grey to the ISPs, non-existent to the users, and bold to people looking for bulk commercial email. Google is adding features to positively tag email from people in your contacts, including showing the picture. One way to get in the Contacts list is to receive two responses.
It’s been 10+ years since people routinely used email responses, most automated emails say not to reply. Perhaps this will bring back communications. If companies are used to getting responses via Twitter, perhaps they can bring it back to the “ancient” email technology.