The real failing is that the interaction paradigms for tuning the noise to signal ratio are extremely manual and difficult to verify if it has been adjusted or filtered properly once set.
I could be as easy as choosing who I care about, what I care about, and when I care about it.. but instead we are forced to set up smart filters, formulas etc and assume that we wont miss anything important.
Also, 5 clicks to unsubscribe is another kind of fail altogether that makes pruning the inbox time consuming and hardly worth the effort when compared to just letting the spam, coupon pepper your real communications. Wouldn't it be nice if email automatically park those offers on a side bar? ..along with the rest of the no-replies? Keeping the conversations and action items front and center.
A great deal of what comes into my mailbox are action items: Fix this. Attend this meeting. Do this by end of the week. Tell me what you think. Don't forget your appointment at the dentist.
What should happen is that 'mail' decides 'fix this' goes to a service desk, 'attend this' goes to a calendar, and so on.
It is not. It's all manual with a veneer of pretty mouse clicks and it sucks.
My car also doesn't fix me dinner, which would be really cool, but the lack of satisfaction of my own personal wishlist doesn't mean the objectives that are set out to be achieved by cars have not been sufficiently met for most people.
Mail is 1s and 0s.
There is no reason why we can't have intelligence acting on those bits: doing rote tasks is what computers are good at.
If you're happy with mail as-is, great.
But consider that it could be better.
MS Excel is a product that accomplishes a certain set of objectives for a great number of people. Suppose the title of this thread were "Why do people say Excel is broken?", to which someone would respond that they can't clickity here and there and have Excel take complete care of their investment portfolio. Whether or not this is technologically feasible, saying that Excel is broken just because it fails (out of the box, at least to my knowledge) to support a particular feature in some particular way that someone may want is silly.
Of course anything can be better, but let's be realistic about what's broken and what isn't.
Fine.
But I'm going to hold on to my fantasy of wanting an app that does in bits what a secretary used to do in real life.
1. I can send invites that automagically add an event to attendees' calendars. Not only that, but I can even set it up so that it reminds them about it an arbitrary time of my choosing before the event's about to start.
2. I can forward contact information around that will automagically put that contact info into the recipients address book.
3. I can create rich, HTML-based emails that now look spectacular instead of just a plain glob of text.
4. I can parse emails and have them file themselves into categories, along with assigning themselves deadlines for response/action entirely automatically.
5. I can now allocate a public folder of email that I can assign some alias to, such as "support@mydomain.com" and have that folder accessible by an entire team of people.
And while I'm sure email could improve, I'm confused as to what things email doesn't do that you want it to do. So, rather than a pithy reply about how email hasn't changed in 30 years (which is simply untrue), why don't you elaborate with what it is you'd actually like to see email provide?