From my chair the big thing you do is sending email content to another app to manage work. Unfortunately where I work I never have the choice of apps. Usually it is exchange or lotus notes. This is how I do it: drop the email in a folder and put some reminder in its place: Create a to-do ( say in lotus notes ), place a link of the original email and leave some self written short version of what was in that mail. Then I move the email to the folder ‘done’. This is where everything ends sooner or later. For the conversation stuff I basically run the same process and use a to-do with the conversation-subject as title and collect all those email-links around it. Since most of the times I am not actively ( talking work not writing email ) involved I flag the task ‘watching’ as a to-do category. At the end of the day I only search in my to-do’s. These todos, if blown up, are big if I were to read all linked emails over again. But that is exactly the thing I do not do. Sometimes I follow the links to get to the attachments, that’s it.