Often times customer service == the development team == the marketing team == the executives == you

When you're a small shop, dealing with this kind of stuff day in, day out can get very taxing.

OK, so set up a filtration system. If you're good enough to build a system capable of running at that level you should be able to set up some basic mail filters or even a more complex bayesian filter to knock out at least bounces and probably a good percentage of autoreplies too.

Removing noise from a system isn't a job where it's perfect or useless; a substantial reduction is often quite good enough.

I don't see why it's necessary to make this complicated: "friendlyrobot" is the filtration system. As you said, it doesn't need to be perfect to be useful.