I just came across a great article on slowing down the amount of emails we get to a regular work schedule. Basecamp implemented the 'Work Can Wait' feature : https://basecamp.com/3/work-can-wait
You can schedule when you want to receive messages.. which I suspect is probably not a super tricky thing to add into the user profile. Then when the cron runs to send out emails just verify it's not during the 'quiet' time they have setup.
What do you folks think?
We don't take hypothetical feature requests, unfortunately. See Contributing Feature Requests for what information we require. General Chat and Ponder are also available to discuss Phabricator in general as well.
If this feature is valuable for you, I think you should implement it in your mail client rather than pursue implementation in every piece of software you use for work. A client-side solution could give you complete coverage with one implementation, and would be more powerful because it could perform additional filtering (e.g., allow important emails through even during off times, or deliver messages but not play an audio alert during off times, or ironically block family communication during work hours instead).
Personally, I think this feature paints a bleak view of work (as meaningless drudgery) and of human nature (as powerless to control our own behavior). These views are very distant from the views of work and personhood that we take in the product today, and I think they are views that we are unlikely to adopt philosophically in the product.
As @chad notes, please read Contributing Feature Requests and Describing Root Problems carefully and completely before you file requests. The latter document explicitly lists "some other software has this feature" as a nonuseful way to file a request:
I've used some other software that has a cool feature. Phabricator should have that feature too.