I was writing an imap client recently and I also thought about using that in the same way to prompt for deadlines or bringing a sense of urgency.
In fact email is wrong but so is ADSL's design (using the high frequencies on copper lines) - yet it works. So at the cheapest, email protocol could simply be augmented with a set of metadata which then clients have to somehow integrate.
It doesn't sound like the solution, but it is a quick and dirty fix. And it may be all we need until the real solution emerges, which I think nobody quite knows what it is yet.
In fact email is wrong but so is ADSL's design (using the high frequencies on copper lines) - yet it works. So at the cheapest, email protocol could simply be augmented with a set of metadata which then clients have to somehow integrate.
It doesn't sound like the solution, but it is a quick and dirty fix. And it may be all we need until the real solution emerges, which I think nobody quite knows what it is yet.