In Thunderbird, go to 'Options > Account Settings', select 'Server Settings' for the server you want to limit from the list on the left, and change the 'Check for new messages every' field to 720 (or however many minutes you want between emails).

I'm certain there are equivalent settings in most email clients.

Edit: Updated seconds to minutes, I misread the form. Although I'm happy to report that you can set it to check every 43200 minutes if you so desire. :)

It is also possible to just not check your email more than once a day, but that's not really the point (which was mostly a joke)

Email tends to be fairly useless in organizations because people don't read them and are overwhelmed by messages nobody needs to read. Slack and the like capitalize on being different from email by being instant and easy, what if someone else could capitalize on being slow and encouraging not-interrupting-people and putting thought into long form communication. (how many meetings have we all been to that should have been three sentences in an email?)

Email is indispensable in organisations because it automatically creates a comprehensive permanent record of all communications (and optimally, one which is searchable after the employee in question has left - keep your work and personal emails separate, people!) Searching old emails for information is a core part of my workflow and has saved my bacon more times than I can count.

(Further to this - I've made it standard practice to send an email after any important phone call, summarizing the conclusions of the phone call. That way both parties have a record of what I thought we decided, and if the other party doesn't disagree then their tacit acceptance is also recorded.)

> Email tends to be fairly useless in organizations because people don't read them

What organization do you work in? Everywhere I've worked, I've been responsible for every piece of information sent to me. Slack doesn't help at all. Conversations are based on person-to-person communications rather than ideas like an email thread with a subject line.

I have been in many different environments almost exclusively technical organizations selling tech in some form or another from tiny startups to enormous organizations, and the only time I remember anybody really caring about email was my first job at a university. I think that was mostly because IM barely existed (literally my first task was setting up an XMPP server).

> I have been in many different environments almost exclusively technical organizations selling tech in some form or another ... he only time I remember anybody really caring about email was my first job at a university

So when a sales person recieved an email from a prospect they would ignore it? When a developer recieved an email about a bug in production they would ignore it? All communication was done over chat? It's not impossible, but pretty implausible.

Just use any email application and don't have it online all day, except when you manually sync.

I bet you could use Mail.app and create an automator task to run on a schedule. Or just use a cron job.

The idea is more about instilling a culture of treating email or something like it in a specific way by introducing restrictions which are unavoidable and not about changing how one person reads email.

That's why I included the second part of my comment. It automates it so you don't have to think about it.

While it seems interesting at first glance, it would be weird to be paying for a product that does "less" than alternatives. The added value of strictly enforcing this policy is also something that people can learn to do innately. Also, distraction-prevention startups never seem to work well ultimately, since people want to distract themselves.

Anything that aligns incentives between the startup's business and user communication effectiveness would be welcome, honestly. So many services are just designed for "engagement," which often leads to synchronous alerts and chat-like communication.

Startup idea: a mail service that only delivers once a day, has a nominal cost to senders, and has a secretary service to throw out the advertisements and other junk.

Note: a spam filter does not fulfill the secretarial service requirement.

Google Inbox had this feature. RIP