It's not about a to-do list. Email is a generic container. It can contain to-do's, sure. But it might also be a letter from a friend, an invitation to a weddin

It's not about a to-do list. Email is a generic container. It can contain to-do's, sure. But it might also be a letter from a friend, an invitation to a wedding, a mailer about discounted products. The way to improve this is to redirect emails to the relevant place. To-do's to my to-do app, invitations to my calendar, mailers to my Flipboard like app that sucks in all offers and puts them in one place. The point is none of this stuff should ever touch my inbox. Additionally, if I don't have a "offers mailer app like flipboard" I'll never see those offers. This can't be done at the client level. But it could play nice with existing email. As the message comes in, you either have an app (registered on the server) that says it can deal with that email content or the message gets bounced. It's kind of harsh, but I suspect most people's inboxes are taking way too much time out of their day - more that it should. Then on the client side, you'd have a collection of apps that would be designed specifically to deal with those message types.