This invention allows the use of standard e-mail systems by a document capture system to solicit document metadata from a user. The document capture system sends an e-mail to the user associated with the captured document. The e-mail body contains the names of the metadata properties supported by the repository system for the captured document. An attachment to the e-mail consists of a screen resolution image of the first page of the captured document to remind the user about the particular document for which metadata is being requested. The user edits a reply e-mail body to supply metadata values for each of the metadata property names. When the user sends the reply, the document capture system extracts the metadata values from the e-mail body and stores the supplied metadata values and the captured document into the repository.