Is there any way to organize instant messages?

Question

Today's generation, including our children, loves instant messaging. From my point of view, it has significant drawbacks. Why? Because it quickly becomes disorganized. Messages, photos, and other information is all in a jumbled stream. By contrast, email messages can easily be organized into folders and retrieved months or years later. Searching through email (or separate email folders) is a breeze. By contrast, finding something in instant messages (including wonderful photos) that is a week old, a month old, a year old, eludes me.
The other beauty of email is that when a message arrives by email, the recipient can keep it in his or her inbox as a constant reminder that it needs to be dealt with before filing it away in a more hidden location (an email folder). Instant messages, by contrast, pile up over time (often with a recipient in my generation not even recognizing that one has arrived) and there is no way to keep the significant action items visible while filing away the others.
Does anyone know of any tips or apps that might impose order on instant messages? If so, I suspect other members of my generation would be grateful to know about them. I feel foolish enough about asking this question that I wish Apple didn't require me to use my real name. :-)

Answer 1

Thanks Kilgore-Trout (love your name and love Breakfast of Champions). That is indeed the problem. Some day I hope these two tools will converge so that the recipient may easily move an occasional important instant message to email to establish permanence. Current methods for doing that are so primitive as to be useless.