I added Bob Walsh to my feed list quite a while back, and have enjoyed reading his posts on building a Micro-ISV and task management / GTD (Getting Things Done, a task-management philosophy / methodology promoted by David Allen). I came across him via his Master List Professional app, when I was looking for task management software one evening (I'm building my own, but keep looking every once in a while to see what's out there). If you lean towards a more "engineered" approach to living, and like to kind of semi-formally "keep score" re: your own productivity, goal-accomplishment etc., you might find Master List Professional worth a look. (By the way, Bob, I dig the new "spinning plates" header on your blog.... that's great!).
In one of his recent posts he touches on a subject fairly near and dear to my daily experience -- bridling e-mail to comform into a reasonably capable task-managment tool.
I've found that, for me (and I'm only speaking for myself here), using e-mail as a task management tool -- of much of any kind -- seems to be a fundamentally flawed approach... and a while back I think I finally figured out why: it encourages the exact same sort of "brain churning" (when you're cycling through in your brain, without taking any progress-making action, "I need to do this... I need to to that... and, oh yeah, I've got to reply to so-and-so," etc) that GTD is fundmantally trying to rout by centralizing all tasks in a single, central system. Increasingly, I'm trying to transfer the "action" of the email that I need to take to my "trusted system" (GTD term...more on why I delineate that, later), and mark the e-mail as READ to get it out of my constant field-of-view.
(Of course, my "single, trusted system" is completely in chaos and flux right now, as I work on my TaskPIM app and, in the meantime, live halfway between there, ECCO Pro, and the land of paper lists.... but... hey... I'm digressing... <g>)
All that said, I think there is definitely something to be said for organizing email, even though I do very little of it beyond the automated sorting accomplished by my mail rules (e-mail lists, for instance, all get their own folder, etc). You might want to check out his system.
