If you need to pound a nail, perhaps it would be appropriate to use a hammer... On the other hand, if you need to drive a screw, you might want to use a screw driver... And if you're doing these things for business purposes, you might want to use "power" tools. It should be noted that, like records, tools have a life cycle. For example, in prehistoric times, if you needed to pound something, you might have used a rock or a club... And the screw had not yet been invented. Similarly, today we may be using E-mail to create and share business information that warrants longer-term retention, but the question arises as to whether that is the proper use of the tool. Perhaps it is the best we can do at this point in the maturity of the tools and our usage of them. However, the beauty of E-mail is that it is quick and INFORMAL, whereas business-quality communications, including record-keeping, requires some measure of formality and structure.

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