HispanicBusiness

Do you ever find yourself searching aimlessly through emails to try to find someone's phone number? Imagine if your email client, or computer program, were smart enough to extract that information automatically and organize it.

And how nice would it be to have relevant information at our fingertips, rather than scrolling through dozens of messages from Groupon and Spotify and some site you used to care about 10 years ago.

Project Inbox Zero aims to make this ideal a reality. It envisions a world where email isn't a giant time-suck, where your messages aren't cluttered with Facebook notifications and newsletters, but only "real emails" from real people.

The premise is that we've all accepted the current email status quo, an imperfect system that hasn't changed much from its roots two decades ago. Never considered this? Neither had I, until I encountered Bart Jellema, an Aussie in his early 30s, at a startup event in Cambridge.

The seeds of Project Inbox Zero were planted two years ago. That's when Jellema's startup coupon site, Tjoos.com, was acquired by Los Angeles-based Internet Brands (along with two other websites) for $7.6 million. That allowed for Jellema's "early retirement" (translation: luxuriate in five-star hotels for a year).

During that time, Jellema realized he was spending way, way too much of his leisure time sifting through emails. I have no sympathy for him either. But this pseudo-plight brought us Project Inbox Zero.

Now called ZeroMail, Jellema's project seems to include all the best features of mainstream email platforms and others that you never knew you needed. For instance, in ZeroMail, if you want to create a task, like "go to the movies," and you've been emailing your buddies about the movies, that all gets grouped together.

My personal favorite: the ability to mark an email to let it know that I'm expecting a response by a certain date.

Here's hoping that Jellema's dream of a more perfect email becomes reality, and that he decides to set up his offices here in Massachusetts.