I get 200 to 250 e-mails per day. I estimate that 20 to 25% of that e-mail is legitimate e-mail, i.e., correspondence with real live people, the output of e-mail lists I subscribe to, and advertisements from companies that I agreed to accept e-mail from. The rest is junk that I wade through in order to separate the wheat from the chaff.
I actually don’t hate e-mail. It is the process of separating the good e-mail from the bad e-mail that I dislike.
I have been using Thunderbird as my e-mail client for about three weeks. It spots about a third of the junk I receive and seldom mislabels good e-mail as junk, but it may be able to do better. I will tweak its spam filtering settings to see if I can improve things and let you know how it goes.