(photo courtest of dangering) Lars Ploughman follows up to his 10-to-1 email rules post. Basically email is never ideal as the only collaboration tool, but should be part of an overall collaboration toolset. OpenACS is a collaboration tool that offers some good email integration while preserving the benefits of a collaboration toolset. For example, the discussion forums can be email enabled to send out new posts by email and to accept replies to those emails. This way, someone can refer later to a post by URL and all the email is archived in one place, and indexed for full text search. Other collaboration tools in the OpenACS platform can be enabled in the same way. Almost every applicaiton supports notification of new items and changes by email. Another tool that is becoming more common is RSS syndication. In this way the user chooses to be notified in a news reader instead of by email. To reply from there they can just click on a link and go to the collaboration web site within their browser. A collaboration toolset like OpenACS gives users the option to work with email, rss, or any combination. Of course, new communication mediums such as SMS can also be integrated with the right code. A mix of tools that fit each users work style while preseving a searchable centralized history and current status of the collaboration is a good solution taking advantage of the technology we have now.