People are more comfortable sending me email because they know they havent interrupted my day. They know I can speed-read it, and they dont have to go walk somewhere and invest the time to go do it. I get a lot more information and get a lot more ideas. The beauty of email is that its on demand. Its an asynchronous conversation.
Email is way better because people can do it when they want to.
If I have a phone call or an interview to do, I have to do it at a certain time. Thats much more constraining. If somebody sends an email, they can get at me. I try to stay never more than an hour or two behind on email if I can because that takes cycle time out of everything. Ive got a Java word processor from Apple.