The two biggest issues for me have to deal with communicating with groups of people.
First, I hate being involved with an email conversation between several people that lasts for days and you end up with a 100 email long chain. It's difficult to wade through the crap, everyone has their 10 line signature and the useless privacy warning for a 1 line email. It's annoying and very inefficient.
The other annoyance is not being able to unsubscribe yourself from threads that no longer are of interest to you.
This happened recently at work. I was communicating with our QA manager and our clients QA manager. I had taken care of my part, and they continued the conversation through email yet I still received every email because they would just reply all. Eventually I had to send an email and say "next time you send an email, please remove my name from the list unless I actually need to read the contents of the email."
To me, a simple solution to this is a threaded message board (even ones as simple as like vBulletin and the like from the early 2000's, obviously built with better technologies).
With a message board you have control over how much information you consume, but if someone really wants to send you something, they can send you a private message and ask you to join a conversation. You subscribe to threads of conversation, and then unsubscribe when they no longer interest you.
Find a way to do that in an email client and I'd easily pay $100 for that piece of software.
This was the problem with google wave. It tried to solve the distribution problem, but that's easy and solved. The real problem is the opposite, signal-to-noise and information overload.
Also, there is the general problem of keeping information up to date. If every new participant to a conversation has to follow all the convolutions of the original email thread (some of which may be missing because face-to-face meetings probably happened at one point) then that's a huge waste. Figure out how to create a system which naturally encourages people to sum up the current state of the discussion (perhaps with automated aids) and you'll be ahead of the game.
I feel like google wave tried to tackle these problems as well.
Specifically, it was possible for people to join and leave a conversation much in the same way that facebook messaging threads work now.
While Wave did subscribe fairly heavily to the traditional message and reply model it also had support for wiki-style messages, so it was possible for a summary to be maintained in the top message of each thread. (The instant replay tool I always thought was very cool, too.)
And towards the end it did start to introduce some tools to encourage people to summarise information (although admittedly nothing revolutionary). I'm mainly thinking of its widgets for event organisation, date planning and voting which are always horrible to do via email.
I think Wave had a lot of problems and, it may be, that the problems it did solve it didn't solve well but I do think it at least tried and had a few good ideas.
Gmail solved (mostly?) these problems for me: you can mute conversations (archive & automatically mark new messages as read) from the dropdown menu on the inbox screen.
First, I hate being involved with an email conversation between several people that lasts for days and you end up with a 100 email long chain. It's difficult to wade through the crap, everyone has their 10 line signature and the useless privacy warning for a 1 line email. It's annoying and very inefficient.
The other annoyance is not being able to unsubscribe yourself from threads that no longer are of interest to you.
This happened recently at work. I was communicating with our QA manager and our clients QA manager. I had taken care of my part, and they continued the conversation through email yet I still received every email because they would just reply all. Eventually I had to send an email and say "next time you send an email, please remove my name from the list unless I actually need to read the contents of the email."
To me, a simple solution to this is a threaded message board (even ones as simple as like vBulletin and the like from the early 2000's, obviously built with better technologies).
With a message board you have control over how much information you consume, but if someone really wants to send you something, they can send you a private message and ask you to join a conversation. You subscribe to threads of conversation, and then unsubscribe when they no longer interest you.
Find a way to do that in an email client and I'd easily pay $100 for that piece of software.