Gmail came and my friends went away...

Where have all my friends gone? I used to get 376 emails a day. peeter@ho2mail.com and refi@yourhouse.com were a few of my regulars. I would come back from a 2-day email vacation and tell my brother how difficult it was to trudge through my swath of 1,143 emails. Not any more. I was smart (so I thought). I carefully forwarded each of my seven email accounts to Gmail. At first it was great! I had an inbox that reflected the real email that I was getting everyday. When I checked my email every fifteen minutes, the inbox had not changed. Then fifteen minutes later, ding, 1 email. This cycle continued all day, so that at the end of a typical day I had only received 37 emails. My inbox bandwidth is 10% of its former self. It had gone on a spam diet and lost 90% of its weight. I was no longer troubled/amused with all of the strange email, but in a way became lonely. Let's face it, there is something about saying I just received 476 emails. Of course, we all know that a very large percentage of 476 (maybe 470) is sometimes spam, but there is the chance that all these people really want to talk to me. Gmail came and my friends went away. My cyberlife is more lonely than ever.
:-(