Play-by-email was fun. Almost like playing BattleMaster. 
You're writing all your actions just like you're writing an RP message. Combat is a little slow. We usually did one battle round per day. Our DM had the address of a web site where you could enter e-mail addresses, tell it how many rolls of what dice you wanted, and it would e-mail the results to those addresses. So it was kind of like rolling the dice yourself, and there was no chance of cheating. (By the players, anyway. When the DM does it, it's not called cheating. 
)
I have some grand ideas about a good web-based package that could handle a lot of the different parts; I have a significant chunk of the map-walking part written, but mothballed.
It shouldn't be that difficult to write something that could handle it all so that it could be played in a similar manner to BM. It would lose something of the feel and flavour of traditional P&P D&D, but it would at least let people play...
