No, academics do not "forget" to answer emails. They remember and feel bad about them, the guilt slowly building up, until the only way out is to fake their own death and move far, far away under a different identity to build a new life, a better one, with inbox zero and no shame

Anyways, I owe you an email.

@ccanonne one academic I knew declared email bankruptcy after 20,000 unread emails. It was overwhelming. She deleted everything and figured if it was important, they'd write again. (I hope she'd unsubscribed from lots of things before tho)
@AtelierLarose @ccanonne fortunately my university forced everyone to switch to Outlook, so unanswered emails just mysteriously disappear or become impossible to find after a while.