Heard and interesting idea the other day

I was speaking with an IT person yesterday who mentioned the idea of using email headers to do an analysis of communication structures/patterns within an organization. He mentioned the fact that the headers would help not only trace person to person data but also email threads, order, etc so that you could pick a topic and analyze the evolution/distribution of information in it.

I did some quick reading at http://www.bath.ac.uk/bucs/email/anatomy.shtml and have to say am pretty intrigued by the idea. . .It is an example of a huge un-mined dataset .
A quick search in the ACM digital library for 'email header' returned 200 documents, the first few of which were directly related. one in particular called 'mining email social networks' from International Conference on Software Engineering archive Proceedings of the 2006 international workshop on Mining software repositories table of contents was right on topic.

As the week went by, I came across a few instances of the use of Email headers as an analysis tool. Apparently several studies have used them to track communication already. Is this a new type of data gathering (automated, system based, objective/qualitative) or just a twist on the sorts of observations that could be made in ethnographic studies?