Information overload

Just read this good post by Jeff Atwood on why email has become such a pain in this information age. I totally agree. I have been in situations at work where I would spend like over an hour reading all my mails and another hour or so to respond to them. It is crazy at times. I sometimes feel that email has led to an information overload. You have so many mails in your box and sieving through them all consumes precious time and doesnt really help much in making effective decisions. sometimes, you have to read through that mail to realize that it has been a waste of time. I m not referring to spammers spam to a "genuine spam". So how do we solve this problem ? I may be wrong but I look at it as a classification problem. From all the mails, the system should auto classify and show me what I really want for that day / moment. Sounds pretty challenging but I guess using proper ML techniques, we "might" be able to nail it.