...smart ways to separate notifications from emails requiring response, better tools for consuming email can significantly reduce the time burden required for email.
Indeed. This is the entire concept behind Inky's Smart Views. (http://inky.com) Still beta; we're focused on stability and bug fixing.
On the note of smart views, any idea how representative my data is of the typical email user?
Separately, I'm curious to know how far smart views go with aggregation - i.e. if I get 10 facebook friend request emails, are they combined? Or is this an irrelevant question in the smart view paradigm?
We don't know if your inbox is representative; we don't actually see users' emails so we don't have stats on what kinds of mail people have.
The smart views continue to evolve; we've been iterating them to find the right model -- it turns out to be pretty subtle from a UX standpoint. That's another reason we're not formally launched yet.
Indeed. This is the entire concept behind Inky's Smart Views. (http://inky.com) Still beta; we're focused on stability and bug fixing.