However, I would like to humble suggest that one possible angle has been missed. Email for collaboration is obviously a mistake since using email for many-to-many situations causes a torrent of responses to a single initial message. You have pointed out the specific case of email for file collaboration and suggested wiki collaboration and blogs as an alternative. Another possible alternative I would suggest is document management systems, which allow everyone to access and collaborate on documents in a central place (as opposed to sending them back and forth as attachments)

Other “collaborative” situations which contribute equally to the email deluge are – assigning and managing group tasks, having discussions and reaching consensus, coordinating on schedules. Moving to online collaboration tools (task management, discussion forums, voting) for these purposes would ease email pressure as well.

I would love for you to read our white paper @ http://hyperoffice.com/business-email-overload/ and give your opinions.

Instead its UI encourages using URLs of existing online docs. Just maybe it could support “uploading” to some kind of repository (including DMS, Google Docs, etc) and forward the URL to the recipients.

Thanks for the mention of my article, and thanks also for the inspiration to write it!

And you are right, reducing use of Word does cut down my email quite significantly.

Bill