[Pheter]

My issue with email is that it is hard to quickly extract the information that I need from it. This issue does not usually stem from what the sender has written, but how it has been sent, and how various email clients interpret the message.

Threaded email conversations were a step in the right direction, but I've yet to come across an implementation that just works. I wish email clients were designed to look more like instant messaging applications by abstracting away everything in the body apart from the actual content.

Most clients handle replies acceptably most of the time, but I also want to see signatures gone (perhaps recognising phone numbers and adding them to my address book) and automatic re-formatting forwarded emails so that it looks like it was sent directly to me.

Of course sitting back and complaining is lazy and unproductive, perhaps I should have a go at building an email client that abstracts away the frustrating parts of email.

Edit: I'm envious of a lot of collaborative communication apps that exist but unfortunately everyone has to be using it which is a barrier to entry that it some circumstances, is just too high. I envision a similar tool that is built on top of email as a standalone application (web and/or desktop). This would afford the benefits of making communication a much quicker and easier to manage process, while not requiring anyone you need to communicate with to change their process.