In saying 'email doesn't scale well' I think you're really saying 'I don't scale well' (as you hint in mentioning a personal assistant) - in reality the problem is that email scales so well as a flexible and quick communication medium that people simply can't keep up - if you used any other form of communicating with these people who want some of your time (telephone, face-to-face etc) it would be even more cumbersome. Is it even possible to give a slice of your time to hundreds of people a day and still lead a productive and happy life? Should we try, or should we cut down the number of people we give this privileged access to? Our time is finite after all, and reading or answering email from people we don't know is not necessarily a good use of it.
Another approach to the problem of huge volumes of mail is to classify your senders at the point of contact by giving them different email addresses. That lets you check one mail address frequently (for close and valuable contacts only), and one email address every few days (for casual contacts, website contact, mailing lists etc), and only give out the important email to those whom you trust to use it appropriately (i.e. never publish it). This helps considerably to cut down volume which you see every day.
Email's strength is that it is a distributed free-form medium which can contain any sort of content. Trying to enforce structuring content with simplistic templates like this is just wasting the sender's time instead of yours - why give them the email address in the first place if you don't have time to read and respond properly? Why not have a web form which imposes structure and emails you the result, or an FAQ on a website?
While I agree there are huge problems with email as it stands, I'd say they're more to do with identity and sufficiently sophisticated semantic processing of incoming mail for those who receive a lot of it, not with the structure of email itself (which is admirably simple and has served remarkably well), or lack of hints as to contents (NB any such hints in the control of senders will be abused mercilessly by spammers).
Our time is finite after all, and reading or answering email from people we don't know is not necessarily a good use of it
If this were true, the solution would be dead simple - stop reading email.
The problem is that not all email is created equally. There are some emails that are incredibly important and most that are not. The problem is that it's impossible to sort it ahead of time.
Another approach to the problem of huge volumes of mail is to classify your senders at the point of contact by giving them different email addresses. That lets you check one mail address frequently (for close and valuable contacts only), and one email address every few days (for casual contacts, website contact, mailing lists etc), and only give out the important email to those whom you trust to use it appropriately (i.e. never publish it). This helps considerably to cut down volume which you see every day.
Email's strength is that it is a distributed free-form medium which can contain any sort of content. Trying to enforce structuring content with simplistic templates like this is just wasting the sender's time instead of yours - why give them the email address in the first place if you don't have time to read and respond properly? Why not have a web form which imposes structure and emails you the result, or an FAQ on a website?
While I agree there are huge problems with email as it stands, I'd say they're more to do with identity and sufficiently sophisticated semantic processing of incoming mail for those who receive a lot of it, not with the structure of email itself (which is admirably simple and has served remarkably well), or lack of hints as to contents (NB any such hints in the control of senders will be abused mercilessly by spammers).