Email is the place where information goes to die
So, I've been accused of using the title for this post -- "Email is the place where information goes to die" -- quite a lot. I figured I should probably claim it by making this blog post.
Update: Roland found the original quote by Bill French, April 2003.
And yes, I still believe it: email and mailing list is great for quick back and forths. It's terrible for synthesizing information and finding a conclusion a week later.
I'm in favour of web native / crawlable archive systems. Email for notification and quick discussion, but give it a permalink to the conclusion.
I have many (many, many, ...) gripes with Basecamp, but even if you use it as nothing more than a centralized email archive, it's pretty decent. Other strategies? The Trac wiki/ticketing/SVN repository, email enabled forums (with RSS, of course), etc.
Synthesizing and collecting all the resources we deal with is import. Help make information not die, your future self will thank you 
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By and large, I agree with
By and large, I agree with you. I tend to keep confidential information, or private threads, in email (or, more accurately, in IM) and shared, archive-desired threads in a forum like Basecamp.
I find Google Talk's autosaving of chat discussions to be an amazingly powerful tool. Knowing that every IM I have had will be archived in a "chats" folder has built up some new habits in me, like forwarding entire conversation threads onto others, searching bast realtime chats, and more.
Oh, and I hope I didn't incite all of this with my Basecamp posts this week, Boris. I do enjoy quoting you on this, though.
-Jeff
PS: Annoying as all getout having to create an account here to comment. Doubly annoying that at least one of the links in the "welcome mail" takes me to a page that I'm not authorized to access. If you're gonna put up barriers, at least make sure they're clean.
Difficulty in signing up etc. etc.
Cobbler's son, shoes, etc.-- you know the drill. It is absolutely amazing the lengths to which spammers will go. In fact...they are now registering accounts and spamming after 2/3 days of accounts sitting there.
This whole site is in dire need of a spruce up one of these days....thanks for taking the trouble to sign up and comment.
No, you didn't incite the post, or at least not completely...figured it was time to put a stake in the ground around the term, at least.
And really: the whole Gmail / Chat archiving thing is an example of a particular app driving different behaviours: GMail's search is so good, that we "trust" it for our personal archiving. I was thinking more in context of longer email threads, particularly those from mailing lists, and pointing out the conclusions: unless someone takes the time to pull it out of their personal mail store and expose it somewhere more searchable...there it sits, slowly dieing as we forget even the search terms that would bring us there again.
Email
I completely agree that there are better ways to have a discussion than email. However, I don't think email is entirely useless either. Maybe if you're stuck in some hole using Outlook or some other simple pop reader, but most people I know use gmail nowadays. For most things I do, it works pretty well -- I can see the whole conversation thread, I can search for any words that are important, and I can tag things that are still under discussion or file them in a folder when they reach a conclusion.
I'd be interested in having you elaborate on the "web native /crawlable archive systems." I'm not sure what you mean there.. Most enterprise type discussions aren't generally open to everyone, which is why email is attractive. If we had some web discussion forum, that means everyone has to authenticate and extra care has to be taken with who can or cannot read particular discussions.
I totally agree email might be lacking for these type of things, but I don't have any concrete examples in my head of systems that are generally much better for enterprise environments or sensitive discussions (not to say they don't exist -- I've just never used one). If you have any suggestions, I'd love to hear them.
ps - previewing this caused a server error