I'm disappointed this isn't something similar to psdoom [1], as I originally imagined it might be. What could be more natural a metaphor, for the cognitive sink of heavy and mostly superfluous inbox traffic, than headcrabs and headcrab zombies?

[1] http://psdoom.sourceforge.net

I'll make sure out frontend lead takes this into account for v2.

Excellent! I look forward with eager anticipation to being able to crowbar my way through a full inbox, instead of just wishing I could.

They're waiting for you Gordon, in the spam folderrrr.

I don't understand what's with people and email. My inbox is always zero, I get the seldom update email from Google/Facebook/whatever, but that's it. If I have to contact someone email is the last thing I use, first I try Facebook, text and calling.

I disabled mails from Facebook, Amazon et similia.

I guess the only thing that I do that most people don't is that I don't subscribe to all kinds of crap and I don't put my email address online. In fact, I have had my gmail address since 2009 and I have had exactly 0 spam mail, and that's not hyperbole.

Do you have a job? It's easy to deal with personal emails (99% of the time they're marketing crap, and the 1% that isn't is something nice from someone you like). It's the work emails that get you (and what I assume this is targeted at, given the "come back from vacation" part)

And then you focus in your work email for a while and personal explodes. At least this happens to me as a vast portion of my network is international.

The other half life :-) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_decay

Precisely the model we follow :), and the reason we named the tool that way: "Not only does Half-Life refer to the scientific model, it refers to the feeling that we spend half our lives on answering e-mails."

Hm, doesn't let me reduce the number to zero.

doesn't the blog post explain why? the tool doesn't aim for inbox zero (seen as unrealistic) and the decay-equation doesn't answer for zero because it's an exponential.

To understand it better, make sure you head to the About section or read the blog post linked at the top of the page.

Any plans to make this into a browser extension?

how would you envision that working? that'd be interesting.

Some features that come to mind:

Hiding new mail until a given clear-out session is finished.

A count-down icon with the number of email processings required to wrap up your current clear-out sessions.