[dsr_]

It is certainly the case that in most archives, most messages will never be looked at again.

This is the price we pay for not knowing what's going to be important in the future. If we knew that, we could mark the messages immediately and have them pushed into the FAQ or the wiki or whatever.

By obvious corollary, message archives need good full-text searching or else they are useless.

[intrasight]

Our team includes a technician. One of his jobs is to copy important info from email threads to the FAQ wiki. We have a policy to not use one-on-one messages for anything that should be known by the larger team. I preach bus problem avoidance so I am totally on board with that policy.