I am going to start automating my life one email at a time.

No suggestions, but I'm interested to hear what you learn in this. I've wanted to do similar, but email broke for me because I can't arbitrarily sort the list. I could tag messages/tasks with P1/P2/etc, but I'd really prefer infinitely-granular sorting. Also, I don't believe all of my email clients support displaying in this tagged sort order. (in my case, I use gmail in browser and android email client).

I'd be happy to adopt a new email client and have all my email forward there, but it would have to continue to support all my standard email needs, like archiving, address book, lists, etc.

I've thought about building a company around this, but it strikes me as a big problem, because you'd need to support all the standard email stuff, and build a bunch of clients, and all that stuff has been done in spades by existing products.