Uh? I never heard of such complain, unless you don’t take your job very seriously or you are a mess with your e-mails.

If you use software such like Outlook, Mail (osx), Thunderbird I don’t think the “check your email often” would be a problem, also it helps to be very organized with your emails and information.

I have set mail to move automatically all the asana and producteev emails in a designated folder and make Mail to “beep” and “bounce” each time I get assigned a new task, I’m sure you know about this since anyone I know in my work does.

The good thing about emails is that you get the notification, doesn’t matter if you are in home using the computer or outside in your cellphone, you get the same notification at same time.

But again, I just stated the obvious, still I don’t know where the complain about emails come from. While yes, a integrated OS notification would be useful, it would be a lot notifications coming from everywhere, and most OS nowadays use built in notifications to inform you about new emails and it’s content (at least, OSX does).