Is it just me, or should a Web application that sends e-mail be ready to receive it? Blackboard was the first application to irritate me with this bug. It's bad enough I have to suffer through a horrid Web interface, and edit messages in a text area, but then people can't respond to the message!
I thought it might just be Blackboard, but Basecamp has the same dysfunction. Comment notifications can be e-mailed to you, but you can't e-mail back. If you'd like to respond, from within your nice comfy e-mail app, for which you have a ton of muscle memory, you have to click on a link, wait for your browser to come up, maybe log in, find the response area, and then edit your response in one of the world's worst editors (again, the text area).
Makes me want to participate in the conversation!!
This is a plea then, for someone to come up with a good Web app idiom where you can e-mail to the conversation, sort of like, gasp!, a mailing list. Besides, it might actually lead to more active and efficient conversations.