"Those ever-so-overwhelmingly celebrated visionaries at 37signals should consider why people use email in the first place, and then possibly take a step back an

"Those ever-so-overwhelmingly celebrated visionaries at 37signals should consider why people use email in the first place, and then possibly take a step back and chill out." I've had to use Basecamp lately because of a client, and it is an exercise in frustration. Basecamp uses E-mail that isn't E-mail. I get E-mail that my E-mail client says it's sent to me from manager@someco.com, but it's really not. I have to look carefully to see that a reply is not going to go back to that address, but to Basecamp instead. And I have to format my reply in a special way do that it can be machine parsed at the other end. Compulsory top-posting :(. I often get messages that refer to "the attached image". But it's never attached. The image lives at the other end of some link. Often that link takes me to a page that then gives me the real download link. All these intermediary steps just makes stuff take longer while breaking the mental model of how something (E-mail) works. If the goal is to capture all of the messages exchanged among project members, and E-mail gets involved (as it inevitably will), then you're better off letting E-mail be E-mail and working with it instead of trying to supplant it.