I made Plain Email [0] just because I couldn't find any email client with clean work flow without distractions. I use it pretty much every day. Thinking about open sourcing it - just can't find the time to refractor it nicely.
I also built news aggregator 10HN [1] with throttling (ten best articles every morning and every evening). I use it daily and it helped to fight my procrastination a lot. It's also interesting to watch the data how stories evolve and get popularity.
Is anything beyond professional embarrassment stopping you from open-sourcing Plain Email as-is? It looks really nice.
I'm not on a Mac currently so I can't test it. What does 'defer' do?
I also do 'inbox zero' but I don't really find Gmail to be too distracting. The one thing I keep wishing for tho (in any email client) is a default ordering/sorting of unread emails by date-time received, but in a descending order. I'd love to see how hard that would be to implement with your project!
I also built news aggregator 10HN [1] with throttling (ten best articles every morning and every evening). I use it daily and it helped to fight my procrastination a lot. It's also interesting to watch the data how stories evolve and get popularity.
[0] http://www.plainemail.com/ [1] http://10hn.pancik.com