After thinking about this a little more and reading other comments, I had a few more ideas/thoughts:

I think that the messages should be prioritized based on the scale of low, high, and urgent. The sender chooses the priority. But, as they are writing their message they can check the recipient’s inbox to see how many messages are in their reading queue. They can raise or lower the priority for their message accordingly.

On the recipient side, they can schedule messages to be delivered to them based on priority (or other criteria). So maybe I would choose to get messages marked urgent in the morning and then at noon the lower priorities.

Because spam email can’t set it’s own individualized priority it would default to “low” and would show up at midnight or something. You could use these priorities to filter your messages after the fact.

I was also thinki

Something else that would be great is if messages could be associated together retroactively. That way if three people are discussing a topic and a fourth person emails you about the same thing, you could tie it into the rest of the discussion thread so it’s easier to find later. That would be handy in Medium tbh because there are times when I’m inspired to write my own thing but want to tie it back to the original post.