Hey Email

I suspect the best way to fix email is to replace it with something new entirely. Hey is not allowing imports from other services, so initially the experience will get a boost from starting everyone at "inbox zero". This is the same way closet organization systems look so effective, because you always start with an empty closet.

One major improvement email needs will have to happen on the sender side, and that is to send structured data instead of blobs of text. Every email that comes out of a CRM or database, or is template driven already has structured data for things like invoices amounts, locations, phone numbers, etc. This should be marked up with microdata or something so that it can be captured and indexed by the recipient automatically. How nice would it be to be able to search every invoice you've received over the last year? Or to trigger workflows based on that data?