[cmiles74]

I have to strongly disagree with your "cargo cult" and "waste of time" comment. Everyone has different needs and expectations and I have found managing my email in Emacs to be quick, easy and straightforward. This could be in part because I receive more mail that I need to read and comparatively little I need to respond to directly.

While I do use Emacs as an IDE (I do some work in Clojure), I have another instance that I keep open and use solely to manage myself: email, calendar, list of to-do items and their status, miscellaneous notes, etc. At one point I had separate tools for each of these functions but over time I've decided that specialized tools aren't really worth the hassle. Emacs works just fine and everything is in one spot and easy to find.