For the most part, email sucks. Information is hard to find (although Google desktop helps a lot) and attachments are various and painful. Threading mostly does’t work. “Your mailbox is exceeding the storage limit” is a ridiculous waste of my time.

The pain has only become more acute as I’ve moved to a Mac – opening the various MS oriented formats makes the machine groan and brings tears to my eyes.

Email is still the dominant form of communication, and generally the de-facto to-do list. There must be a better way to deal with it.

Here’s a recent example: I get lots of resumes emailed to me in various formats (btw, I’m hiring for the Yahoo Java Platform team, contact me if you know Java super stars). I need to keep track of these along with our comments and assessments of the candidates. Email is absolutely terrible for this.

So I setup a little program to grab the resumes, convert them to html, and turn each candidate into a blog post on an internal blog. Comments on each post document our interactions and evaluations, and categories serve to categorize the candidates and next steps.

It works very well – no need to worry about threads of emails, resumes in multiple formats, etc.

This has me thinking – it’d be nice to have a system that does this for all my email, converting it a web accessible form, say a wiki, with all attachments converted to html. Threads would be combined and put into a unified page. Throw in Google Desktop or other desktop search and you’d have a nice and accessible archive of your emails that you could maintain as you switch laptops, operating systems, etc.

The online app world is part way toward this – Gmail with Google docs, for example, gets you part way there. But for obvious reasons I don’t really want my internal email living on Google servers. I need something internal, probably something that lives on my own server.

I have the email processing part already, it’s pretty straight forwards. Word to html conversion works well with “abiword –to=html”. I don’t have a solution for excel and powerpoint conversion yet. OpenOffice seems promising, and I’ve spent some time playing with it in the past, but it’s not well setup for commandline conversion. Batch conversion seems a fairly obvious thing; I’d like to see command line arguments for OpenOffice to do the conversions, ala AbiWord.

Anybody know if there’s already an email to wiki system out there? Ideas or interest in this?