The point of the letterbox in your front door or the mailbox on your lawn is to ensure selected information and items can be delivered to you. That unsolicited individuals may crave your attention — by paying third parties to stuff them with promotional literature — is neither the purpose nor the benefit of owning a letterbox.

The point of your handset is to allow you to communicate with others, and allow others to communicate with you — at your convenience. It’s not to provide unrestricted access for anybody who is in possession of, has paid for, or chances upon your cell number.

Then there’s your email account. The rules should be the same. Its purpose should be to benefit you. Your inbox should offer you convenience before anyone else, and only at your say-so — but it feels increasingly that we’re losing control, that we’re under siege. That we’re drowning.

Email has become an overwhelming experience, a relentless rally of unsolicited information, far more than we’re capable of effectively absorbing or responding to. Once someone has our address, we can’t control who they share it with or what they send. The more savvy amongst us may take the time to fastidiously filter, set up folders and dummy addresses when registering for services and newsletters — but the majority of us will watch helplessly as our inboxes are flooded by an inexhaustible fire-hose of diarrhoea. We passively accept abuse of our email address on an hourly basis and what’s more, we actively encourage it. We piss and moan about receiving too many emails, then give away our address to yet another online service.

How many emails do we delete or archive without replying, or even reading? How many of us treat our inbox as a neverending to-do list? And when did ‘Inbox Zero’ become a tangible life goal? With all our potential and opportunities, consider what a truly miserable ambition that is.

It’s become popular to talk about ‘email being broken’, but that’s not necessarily fair, nor true. The services we use for receiving, categorising and responding to email may be ineffective when dealing with volume, but unless we’re prepared to stop adding our email address to registration forms and content with its removal from our business cards, little will change.

Email is broken, but so is our attitude towards it: our dependancy on its promise; our addiction to activity; our insistence for information in ignorance of the quantity or quality that may follow; our inability to distinguish between the brief and the self-indulgent. In a noisy world, a quiet inbox unnerves us. “Is anybody else having trouble with their email?” we’ll ask our colleagues when an expected response fails to arrive. And when did you last meet someone who didn’t have an email address? What year was that, exactly?

Society, on the whole, has become email’s bitch. We wanted more, and we got what we wanted; now we have bellyache and we’re still whining to be fed.

If we accept our issues with technology are the symptom rather than the cause, then the situation changes; the solution isn’t simply to ‘fix’ email. For example, Mailbox was celebrated when it launched a year ago, on account of its revolutionary user experience. In essence, it allows you to process email faster, or delay dealing with it until later or altogether. That’s fine, but it doesn’t mean you receive less email, or deal with more relevant messages. It doesn’t encourage us to be less dependent on email. Mailbox describes itself as a mobile-first email experience; what we really need is an experience that puts people first.

So what’s the answer? It seems a more effective solution would be to use technology to manage our relationship with email:

How do we stop everyone with our email address having access to our inbox and, in turn, our attention?

Is there a way to delineate that space? Some services kick back an email if the sender is unknown, requiring them to verify their identity before the message reaches the recipient. Could we go further? If somebody can’t qualify the value of an email, why should somebody read it?

Can our inbox better determine whether an item is relevant to us?

Google have tried this for years, with starring and importance rankings. It helps from the point of view of search, but GMail still treats a newsletter I open rarely and an email from my mother with equal weight. The recent addition of Categories didn’t improve matters because then there were three inboxes instead of one—and there were emails in each that I’d class as relevant as each other.

I could create a new rule for every email address that places every new item in a corresponding folder; that would work well for archiving but day-to-day I’d be back in multiple inbox hell.

Rather than filters based on the source, why not display items based on my past engagement? I always open an email from my mother, and I always reply to it. Chances are, those emails is more relevant to me than a newsletter sent regularly that I rarely read.

Think about what Foursquare is doing to surface relevant information at the right time. Unless a friend’s tip about a cafe you’re passing by is likely to make a difference to your day, you won’t know about it. Foursquare is surfacing relevancy as derived from a user’s personal data and its relationship to friends and other users.

Why should inboxes care about delivery time?

Presenting emails in chronological order forces a false perspective; we’ve been trained to assume a newer item is more important than an older one. Mailbox allows you to drag and drop emails into a different order, but this is a manual action rather than automatic.

If 100 emails were sent to you simultaneously, how could they best be managed? Would you really need to see them all? How would you ensure the most important email remained above the fold or at least on the first page? (Do pages even make sense in an inbox?)

Forget faster; how do we get smarter at responding to email?

We can’t deal with a significant volume of email without devoting a proportional amount of our time to the effort. If we can’t solve the problem of volume, could our inbox help us become more efficient? ShortMail limits emails to 500 characters, while three.sentenc.es asks both senders and recipients to consider brevity in their replies. They’re not fully-formed solutions but they at least acknowledge a fundamental issue.

Does email really need to look like email?

Perhaps we can start by recognising email for what it is — content.

Facebook flipped messages into messaging with no effort and the two are now interchangeable; there’s still a Messages tab and a separate chat service, but they’re the same content presented in different formats. Look at how Twitter and Facebook present comments, media and links — and then consider how Flipboard transforms the same content it into something altogether different.

Strip away the inbox, separate out the content, disassemble the metadata that embodies an email — time, date, sender, subject, tags, folders, attachments — is there a better way to put this collection of information back together?