Are emails the new article popularity measuring stick ?

[JS_Harris]

An example, Yahoo! Buzz.

Article popularity is guaged by how many "buzz clicks" it receives but the calculation includes how many times the article is emailed as well. I'm sure other applications take how many times an article has been emailed into consideration so my question is...

Should webmasters start making sure we offer article email as an option not just because it's convenient but because the emails may also affect rank in various places?

On a side note about Yahoo! Buzz - isn't giving links to "similar articles" that link to the Yahoo! articles going to anger the Google link gods? If regular website owners and wordpress bloggers adopt the practice link value will become even harder to gauge imo.

[phranque]

emails won't affect rank.
that is mostly a factor of on page content and inbound links (from other web pages, not email).
you should provide the email option if you think that is useful to your visitors.
if it gets no usage, remove it.

in general, google is ok with any links that seem natural.