a lot of productivity stems from the use of email. likewise, a lot of productivity is lost by having to deal with massive email archives. plus, email tends to be unmanageable for most people once it leaves their inbox and disappears into some email folder (or more likely, is deleted)

as john udell discusses in NNTP, IMAP, And The Semantic Web, email needs to be better integrated with other technologies. i have a few ideas how this might be done with weblogs.

• mail-to-weblog gateway: converts mails to weblog posts, and replies to comments by analyzing the message id of the email
• map email addresses of a mailing list with user accounts of a weblog
  
• add a X-Topic header to email to facilitate integration into a weblog
• assign categories to imap folders -> match with weblog
• attach discussion on imap folder / imap messages

the goal should be to make most email traffic google searchable. google has become so important that if your content is not in google, it could as well not exist. this is exaggerated, but has a point.