A month a go we had a conversation at work about enterprise 2.0 and we stumbled upon email. We alll agreed that email was getting overwhelming. I guess that we received 100 emails during that duscussion alone! The problem of email is that it lacks context. Most people have a hard time putting email in context. GMail is trying to cope with that by using threads and it is succeeding partially. Outlook lets you define rules to manage email automatically. But this is just peanuts. Email is part of all sorts of other stuff like documents, presentations, websites, meetings (on- and offline). Some search engines combine this stuff a litte bit, like the search in mac OS X.
It is very easy to send and receive email (and thus has set the standard for usability), but it stays confined to outlook of gmail. To archive one email is a hell of a job, let alone 50 per day.
Here are some thoughts on email and enterprise 2.0
Maybe you want to have a tagging application across all other applications in the enterprise. Maybee enterprises must irritating people with storage limits and let them leave everything online so email stays a part of the enterpise!A service that lets people store email in context in one step.