[SpiralOcean]

I empathize with your situation. It's difficult to know the environment that you are in. For me, part of GTD was slowing down the email chatter. Checking email twice a day (morning and afternoon) and processing the email inbox down to 0. (in theory checking twice a day, in reality I usually check email when I send email as well).

One suggestion you may have or have not tried. Do you have an email context? You could process your email inbox to 0, using OF to add actions to the email context. Then right after processing switch to the email context and process all those emails.

One other trick I sometimes use is the draft email box for messages that I want to respond to. When processing the email inbox I hit reply then save as draft for emails that I know will take a while to respond to. Then have an action in OF to process all draft emails.