Email blasts from public relations people have become the norm — everyday is a new battle for managing my inbox, and trying to sort the crap from the valuable information. But at this point, how can we even tell what’s valuable and relevant to us, when almost every blast looks and sounds the same?

I asked this question to the Twitterverse this morning: “This is an honest question, not intended to be snarky: Do people read PR blast emails? Or just delete on sight? Depend on the product?”

The response was huge, and overwhelmingly leaning toward “delete on sight.” There were also many with a slightly less itchy trigger finger, like Michael Gaines (@istarman) who says: “Depends. I know whether I should read the whole thing after the first sentence.” I’m in that boat as well, as long as the first sentence isn’t written in all caps.

Clearly, it costs almost nothing to send an email blast to thousands of people, so the return of just a few bloggers and journalists writing about the topic is probably worth it to them. But do these emails turn people off of a product that they might otherwise be interested in? I’ve built spam filters around entire people and companies now, since they had such a bad track record of poorly executed form emails. If they suddenly represent a product that I might enjoy, I’ll never know. Sure, I could spend time creating complicated filters or scripts for my email, but hitting the Spam button is far easier.

With all the info that pours in everyday, I’ve taken to rely on the wisdom of crowds: if there’s news that’s worthwhile for me to know, it’ll pop up on Techmeme or Twitter/FriendFeed soon enough. As for PR blasts, I know it’s hard to write a personal note (and adding the recipients name at the top doesn’t count) but it will assure that the email is read, at least in my case. If you’re in the field of public relations and want to know how to better reach your audience, Rafe Needleman has an excellent blog called Pro PR Tips that could help with avoiding potential faux pas. Ryan also has a post about how to not pitch a blogger.

With so many different options out there today for reaching your target audience, why alienate them with spam? We’re all hungry for information, but with the signal:noise ratio these days it’s becoming harder to separate the worthwhile from the worthless. If you’re landing directly in a spam filter, you never even had a chance.