Web processes cannot afford to work on optimizing results for you in the background, they are focused on getting your answer quick and then moving on to the next customer. On the other hand, right now I've probably got 98% idle CPU on the 8 cores of this machine which could be figuring out when and how to deal with my email by looking at the terabytes of local data I've collected over the past few years.
It's a shrink wrapped product, not a service. Given how well Google and Facebook can serve individually targeted ads over the web based on a handful of CPU cycles, odds are that a dedicated local service could handle email if utilizing idle CPU cycles.
> It's hard to tell which email is important, and it's hard to tell which important emails haven't been dealt with.
Does it mean that you get way more unimportant emails than important ones? Can't you just filter them away to tags/trash?
And a lot of the unimportant stuff I want to at least glance at, if I have a spare minute.