Hey, thanks for the kind words!

I actually think a few small improvements in email programs would lead to enormous improvements in personal productivity. The keys are realizing:

• Email messages are to-do items. If nothing else, you have to delete it. For non-spam, you need to at least read it. All others turn into to-do items; if you can't deal with it right now, you need to be able to mark it for future consumption easily. (Similar to how if I get a piece of paper I can't deal with until November 15, I should put it into the November 15 folder.)

• People won't look in folders other than their inbox. They need to have one place to look at all of their to-do messages.

• Having a View that groups messages by the social network of the sender can be enormously helpful, since usually you want to be dealing with one group at a time. For example, all your skydiving club mail OR all your work email OR mail from your family. Bonus points if the email program can expand/collapse groups; even more if it can order them according to how important that social network is to you. Put my boss at the top of the inbox; put people I've never corresponded with at the bottom.

• Indicating how you were addressed (to me and only me, to me and other people, cc me, bcc me, etc) can help you see how urgent a message is. I like color, e.g. red for to-me-and-only-me, down to grey for bcc-me.

In combination with prioritized grouping by sender's network, this can make it really easy to see which messages to pay attention to. Red and at the top? Look at right away. Grey at the bottom of the mailbox? Delete.

• For most people, most mailing lists are informational: they never turn into action items. Go ahead and move those mailing list messages to a separate folder.

For more on the Perfect Email Client, see

http://emailoverload.com/philosophy/PerfectClient.html