Joel Olsen has just posted some guidance on Email Enabled Lists and Inbound Email

There is some good advice in there regarding internal sources of email.

Here is my killer scenario for using an email enabled discussion forum.

How many public web sites do you see the "For sales enquires contact us mailto:sales@blablabla123xyz.com (blablabla actually exists, so I didn't want to get them added to spam lists)

And where does that email go? I often ask customer this question and they always say "to a shared mail box or DL".

So who knows when someone has dealt with the enquiry? How do assign the enquiry to someone based on the appropriate subject matter expertise? How can you analyse the type of enquiries you receive?

I guess you can see where I'm going with this. Have the email go to an email enabled Discussion group. Add a few metadata columns and throw in some workflow.

The only tip I have if you are going to implement this sort of solution is to ensure you have some good spam filtering before the email gets to SharePoint!