while mail server can cover up to 80% of all business need. their is still a growing 20% that have special requirement.
and yet still need infrastructure to make sure everything work in synergy.

accounting, inventory, billing, costumer info, project management, job ticket, knowledge base, documentation
are specialised need that require tools.
integrating all these tool accross all workstation is a challenge. were continuous integration shine. 
but still dont cover host dependency.

there are transactional level problem with use of email as a communication channel when more than one message is sent at the same time. this is why most big organisation tend to promote wiki and forum for information exchange.

my view is mail are the way to go. people are used to it, it work everywhere.
all mail can be forwarded to a bot that build knowledge base from it and allow instruction to be written inside the mail.
user will be able to ordre some documentation, or search in the knowledge base.
accountant may ask for logbook he can update and resend.
inventory maybe mailed as spreadsheet, then excel may mail update directly.

why this is drafted within gradle?
gradle only require java. and then can fetch all its supporting tool (rest client, git, mail, ... dont forget itself gradleerapper) then its self deployable on every machine with java.
because gradle can fetch grgit natively.
because git is a transactional filesystem.
gradle can process its own database.


user send mail, mail server always forward mail to a bot mail account
with trigger such as git hook and cron job (or simply jenkins)
the tool will fetch all new mail and parse them
will fetch a git repository that act as mail storage
update it and save.
The tool may react on some special synthax on the mail.
either making sure all mail stay consistent
and reply to some request.