I completely understand this problem, and I'm frustrated to no end that innovation in email has stagnated. I have a standing offer at Hackers & Founders events

I completely understand this problem, and I'm frustrated to no end that innovation in email has stagnated. I have a standing offer at Hackers & Founders events to pay anyone who helps me fix my email problems $20 to 40 a month as their first subscription customer. My hair is on fire. I'm a motivated buyer. And, I'm convinced that there are millions of business people world wide that have this very problem. Every single business person that complains about email overload has this problem, but probably can't articulate it well. I need an email system where a contact is considered a first class citized. GMail's innovation was proper management of the conversation (threaded view). But, I'm convinced that their engineers don't see the problems with contact management because they benefit from a universal address book, and they don't interact with random people that aren't in their global address book. Business communication isn't about viewing a single conversation thread. It's about building a relationship with a person over time. In my email, I need to quickly know who I'm talking to, I need to have quick and easy access to previous conversations I've had with this person. I need to be able to easily write comments and meta data about this person. I need my email to automatically recognize contact information from a new person I'm emailing, and automatically put that into my address book. Xobni comes the closest I've seen to fixing those problems. I wish more people would innovate in this space. I've been running H&F for 3 years, and I have close to a thousand contacts. I live out of my email, and sadly, Gmail is increasingly broken for me. In the next month, I'm going back to Outlook + Xobni for email management ( unless the Xobni plugin for gmail is fantastic), and I'm giving up my Android for a Blackberry, because they have a Xobni app. and their email platform seems much more mature. As for the back end, I might still stick with Google Apps for business, but I'm increasingly dissatisfied, and I'm thinking of migrating over to an Exchange based platform. If anyone starts work on fixing this problem, please let me know. I'm a motivated buyer.