It took a while for my team & co-workers to get their head around the fact that I would be checking email only 2x/day and it wound up working great for them and me. But when it came to dealing with ongoing threads/topics, folks were either (or both) to lazy to abide to requested standards or would put off responding until long after their moment of opportunity passed.

Adopting a method of moving these long threads to a Basecamp-style topic management system would have been ideal. In addition to seeing the latest comments, those archives would always be there, saving us all the time to search/sort through the old emails.