Article: email is new database

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4167633.stm

The gist of it is that people have a lot of info stored in email, so it is a de-facto database, if not an intended or discplined one.

The article describes email search techniques, which are probably useful enough to an individual, but what about the relationship of email to the more structure and secured operational databases that companies use?

So lets you say you have a company doing some type of custom work, such as making molds for plastic injection (or a software company). They have some type of job control software perhaps integrated with their accounting. How does the structured job control system relate to the unstructured emails that go back and forth between the customer and the project manager? Not the emails going out from a system as notifications, but the emails going person-to-person in which the project is being discussed.

Seems to me these emails should somehow be pumped through a pipe that gloms useful information out of them and adds them to the paper trail for projects and things. Not a small job however, wish I could say how to do it.

-- 
Kenneth Downs
Secure Data Software, Inc.
(Ken)nneth_at_(Sec)ure(Dat)a(.com)