In this paper we examine the literature to determine how emails are used by researchers who study FLOSS. Such a survey does not yet exist for either the software engineering community or the FLOSS research community. Researchers can use this survey to get a handle on the current state of the art in using email archives for FLOSS analysis. For example, questions researchers might ask would be:
Who has used Method X or Project Y in a study already?
What techniques have already been used, and what were the results? Can I cross-apply these to Project Y or refine their results by adding Method X?
Are there any studies that would be interesting to replicate?