If email is our way of constructing a medical record, we will long remain in the dark ages of dealing with information in healthcare.In a modern email message, everything is an attachment. We tend to think of email as one MIME type: ascii text. But, in fact, a single email can contain multiple versions of the same or slightly different information encoded in different MIME types.
For example, I could write a progress note according to some previously defined template and the client could place that information into an SQL MIME, an HL-7 MIME, and an X12 MIME for billing. So when the message was "sent" it generated lots of stuff that is in fact not particularly human readable, but accomplishes various tasks simultaneously that the creation of a progress note must accomplish.
Ascii text is the tip of the email iceberg.
John
P.S. The only reason to even discuss email is the extremely efficient, incredibly scalable open source software that is the lowest fruit around.
