This sounds amazingly similar to the beginning of our post on Medium [1]. As you point out, email is only part of the whole picture. We're aiming to add the tools to organize email along with your personal/business todos without giving up that agency.

Snippet: "Would you use a todo list where all your tasks are created by someone else, and you can’t prioritize or rearrange them? Of course not — they’re your tasks, so you should be in control. Using a todo list sorted only by creation time would be incredibly frustrating. But that’s exactly what email is."

[1] https://medium.com/moo-do/were-making-email-a-powerful-todo-...