I am happy to use native emacs mail, for sending email.  What I want to be
able to do is keep a copy of my email in an org-mode file.  This file could
be in datebook format, or just a  list, especially if I can tag each email
using org-mode tags.

The solutions I have seen for using org-mode for email seem convoluted,
complicated. I don't need any complicated html mail, just to start up a
mail buffer from org-mode---say, from a todo item, write the email, and
automatically leave a copy of the email behind when I am done.  Perhaps a
capture method would be useful, referring to bbdb for a lookup, although
that's another layer of complexity.

The beauty of org-mode is simplicity: simple text files.

Am I missing something?

Alan