Like everyone else, I've seen the number of cold email pitches coming in increase in the past couple of years.

I never liked such emails, but now I avoid them completely. If I either a) don't recognize the sender, or b) determine within the first sentence that ultimately they want to sell me something, then it gets filed as junk*. I may miss some false negatives but it's a trade off I'm happy about.

* rather than marking as junk in gMail, I instead drag to the "Promotions" tab and reply "yes" when asked to classify all email from that sender as the same. I find this is a more effective filter than putting into Junk, and so Promotions is just a second Junk folder that I never look at, ever.