The University of Illinois Library organized and lead a four-year regrant program that developed the capacity for archives and libraries to collect and preserve email as an integral service offered to their designated user communities and to society as a whole. By regranting funds to other projects through a competitive process, the program fostered potential within the archives and special collections libraries, so that more organizations can process and provide access to email using community-supported tools. The project demonstrated the value of email collections as a public good to be used in conducting humanities, social science, or other research.