Very good piece by Ross Mayfield about email.

It reminded me of an old customer. We used to train this company to use MiniCad, a CAD application. One day they called complaining that they could not write more than 512 chars in a text field and that they were having problems writing faxes with it.

They were using MiniCad as a text editor.

I guess it's a rule for all users: they will try to achieve things using the tools they have at hand, regardless of what those tools were designed for.

I think that many of the problems we are seeing today with email are related to the fact that users were left too much time alone with this tool and started to try doing everything with it. As soon as they are provided with better tools email usage falls sharply (as Socialtext's latest case study shows).