I promise I had not seen this before I wrote this post.

http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2008/12/new-in-labs-turn-email-into-google-doc.html

This looks like the guts of what I was talking about but not necessarily the full process. With this new functionality that Google has just announced, there is still a manual process of creating the Doc, setting it up for sharing appropriately, inviting the others in, etc.

What I would like to see is most of that process automated, using the “To:” line of the email to set up the sharing and notification. Lee

http://lifehacker.com/5111965/convert-a-gmail-message-into-a-google-document

Looks kind of similar to what you are suggesting. I haven’t tried it out yet. Let me know if you do. Christoph