Too many emails that are not communication messages

We usually do not realize the amount of information we get every day, every hour, every minute. Me personally didn't really take it into consideration until recently when I returned back from one-week vacation :) Yes during it I didn't have any access to the Internet :) And to be honest, I do not have such vacations often. The other fact I learned from the HUGE amount of emails, rss updates, social network messages and etc was that such information capacity is much higher than it was 2 years ago and enormously higher than 5 year ago.

Beside this, among other questions I asked myself at that time was the following: why is so much information (like just notifications,  google groups posts, social networks notifications, software updates, repositories commits, new twitter followers and etc...) delivered via emails?

At least me personally want it to be delivered via RSS because of the following reasons:
1. RSS distracts me less from most important activities
2. I would like to use email for communication only
3. I would like communication messages be more distracting than notifications about new repository commits or new friend on facebook, or new discussion posted on google groups.

Actually I would like to have ability to assign different levels of distraction for different information sources, and even more I want ability to configure conditions for each information source to setlevel of distraction, and even more I would like to have ability to switch between different rule sets based on what kind of activity I am busy right now. But that's just a dream, or maybe I'll do it someday, at least I would let you know if I made any progress on it. Do you think it makes sense of having such tool/service? If so what do you personally want it to do? As far as I do not clearly understand how such system would look like yet and would it be pretty complicated to integrate it into existing information flows, I decided to implement pretty stupid service to just cleanup my inbox from all kinds of "spam" I mentioned above and maybe at some point I will extend it to cover all of my expectations.

The service does very simple job: receives emails forwarded to the address (es) it provides for you and aggregates these email messages into generated RSS feed(s). So I have configured forwarding rules on my gmail account to send it to the service and remove from my inbox. Can’t say it has  solved all my problems with  lots of information but now my inbox is clean and I am able to review all the updates from time to time with Google Reader; so it makes me a bit happier than before:)

Here is the service's address http://emails2rss.appspot.com so you can try it. If you find it helpful or think it sucks or you do have another idea how to deal with notifications and updates let me know.

To sum up my post - it's very helpful to go on vacation and very serviceable by the way :)