I also have an idiosyncratic way of organizing this stuff, which is basically to use Emacs + mu4e to search my mail, and if I need to create order, write a new

I also have an idiosyncratic way of organizing this stuff, which is basically to use Emacs + mu4e to search my mail, and if I need to create order, write a new document from scratch. I have a coworker who does what you do, now that you mention it—he will take a series of email, dump it into Word and edit it until it is a useful document of some sort. I still think there is something here though. Stack Overflow replaced message boards, which were basically HTML versions of mailing lists, and part of that was identifying the semantics of question, answer and comment and defining new operators and new expectations for them. A wiki is a good approach but because it's totally free-form, the user gets stuck doing the work of keeping things hygienic. JIRA allows you to edit all the properties of a ticket whenever, but it generates such a huge cloud of email notifications in the process, it kind of disincentivises you from using it. And nobody is in the habit of rereading the page to see what is different since last time.