Right, I get that, but the point I'm making is that the tool isn't suited to the job it's being used for. "Deal with this email" could mean anything from an imm

Right, I get that, but the point I'm making is that the tool isn't suited to the job it's being used for. "Deal with this email" could mean anything from an immediate off-the-cuff answer to a trivial information request, to a project that takes days to complete; email clients generally provide no good method (or just no method, period) of capturing and tracking such tasks, because that's not the job they are designed to do. Worse, as you rightly note, if your email account is also your to-do list, anyone can add to it as frequently as they like. This may or may not make an actual difference in the amount of work you have to do, as for example in a case where you get ten different emails all pertaining to the same task, but it might well have a psychological effect, and it certainly makes it harder to keep track of what you actually need to do. I mean, I don't know. I'm not here to tell anyone they're wrong to do what they've found works for them. But every time the subject comes up, I hear a lot of people saying that what they're currently doing really doesn't work for them, and they've been as yet unable to come up with a better way. From the entrepreneur/innovator side, these pleas tend to be met with yet another attempt to solve problems with email which only exist as a result of making email do things it's neither designed nor well suited to do. I think people would be better served by instead suggesting the use of a tool which actually is suited for the job they're trying to make email do. There are lots of task list managers out there, and almost any of them will do the job more ably than yet another attempt to cram email into a paradigm to which it so plainly isn't suited.