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Folders vs. Tags For Shared Email Accounts?
binarybum writes "I run a student organization with a 10-member 'board of directors.' We hardly ever all have time to attend meetings and a large part of how we interact with the student body is through email. We have a shared email account (accessible by the 10 of us on the board) right now that is typically accessed through an outlook web-access portal. We've been attempting to keep things organized in the account through a complex collection of folders that have been tacked on ad libum. It's turned into a complete mess. I have the onerous task of restructuring the folder system in hopes of achieving sustainable organization, but I'm wondering if I should just switch us over to a tagging system — perhaps Gmail. Has anyone used tags for a multi-user account successfully or does it end up being just as messy?"
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Why don't you just send a copy of every email sent to that address to each of the 10 members individuals addresses, and let each of them sort it anyway they want.
The only way it's going to work well is if no one uses the group account directly, but rather all of the email it receives is forwarded to the individual accounts of the members. Then each member can organize the mail however he or she sees fit.
Use both. Problem solved.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
I'm in the board of a student organisation as well, together with 6 other people. We all have our own e-mail account and one catch-all account. The abactis is in charge of all mail (snail and e) and has her own computer with all of the e-mail accounts via IMAP open. There she can drag and drop e-mail and keep a look at all mail.
This sounds like an ideal application for a Google or Yahoo groups account. You would have a private group for the board. All of the e-mail would be available in a central location, with individual messages accessible by search, and each board member could forward each mail to their own personal account or not, as they see fit.
Why are you *sharing* a single email account? Why not instead have a email account that will forward all e-mails to that one account to every other member of the board?
This is far more efficient, since then each person can manage their own emails, and it's also far more SECURE. When people leave the board, you don't have to keep changing email addresses. Also, when someone sends an email from this one address, you don't know who actually sent it so there is zero accountability.
The solution you have is by far the worst possible solution you could have come up with.
Have a single in-bound email such as "boardofdirectors@school.com", and have the people who are on the board actually get forwarded each email. This is basic functionality for any email system. Even gmail will forward emails to other email accounts.
You can play tricks with the reply-to address or the name on each people's accounts so that the person who receives the email will respond back to the one inbound email address.
My email has never been more organized and I can put things under multiple tags. Using GMail... there are some filtering techniques they are lacking but overall it's great & the have a nice function "filter for emails like these" that can aid in creating filters...
With tags you can create arbitrary categories. So a "status" tag can be assigned to an email that already has a "report" tag but also to the one that has a "meetings" tag. In other words it is like being able to put the same object in two different folders.
One drawback of tags is, that it is harder to visualize. Google does a good job with searching but I can't think how you can visualize it (as a graph/hypergraph actually might work).
The other drawback is that people are more used to folder because they dealt with file systems before ("I'll make a folder for dates, then inside we'll split them by topic" kind of thinking).
If you use imap you'll quickly see that those spiffy gmail labels just copied things into folders
Use a message board.
I like the idea of a Google Apps account and just sending everything to everyone's account. So how does one do such a thing centrally so that users don't have to think about it? My ideal solution would be to have users send mail to distribute@groupname.com and it would then distribute it to everyone in the group. Is that possible with Google Apps?
Yeah, I'm as old as my UID would suggest.
Personally, I like hierarchical organization over tagging. I think it's more natural to organize information this way and helps you to narrow down your subject faster. For example, I have a folder called work within which there is a folder for each project I work on. If I move an e-mail into just one of these project folders, I've already significantly narrowed things down.
Tagging on the other hand is just like having a folder a single level deep. One difference is that you can tag the same e-mail multiple times, but then, can you really be bothered to tag the same e-mail under multiple headings? That would be somewhat like copying your e-mail into multiple folders, an even greater hassle.
I'd suspect that google introduced tagging just because it's easier to tack on than hierarchical folder management.
Emails don't really fit into the folder structure very well because they might belong to several groupings at the same time, thus requiring multiple copies or shortcuts/links to an original (which most email programs don't do). Tags are definitely better for this since an email can have many tags at once.
Here's another idea you might, or might not, like:
Use GMail, or similar, for a group of accounts, one of which is the main, public address. This main account auto-forwards to the 10 member accounts, much like a list-serve. Replies from a member are CC'ed to the main account (set the rules right, or you could end up with an endless loop!!) and the 'Reply To:' field from the members is to the main account. This way, everybody gets everything, the group account is still the focal point, and everybody is responsible for keeping their own account organized.
If a single person is responsible for all of this (you?), you can set it up such that you are the one who can make changes to all the accounts and the others only have emailing privileges (but I haven't thought this part out and it may be difficult with some systems). One thing to consider if you use this is to either have an agreement (which some will break) or a setup that does not allow the users to use this account setup with out the CC'ing. This prevents them from using the account for personal or nefarious reasons.
I hope this comment is well received... I could have moderated instead!
Persecutors will be violated!
So every time I have a petty little problem that I could easily solve on my own with a bit of research and some time spent finding what works for me and doesn't work for me, do I get to troll slashdot with it? Seriously. Do you REALLY need a "community effort" to figure out how to sort your e-mail? It's not like this is some special, unheard-of, unique problem that no one has ever encountered and solved before.
... wait for it ... many different answers. Such is the nature of a problem that does not have One Correct Solution. Life has many such problems.
... I forgot how adults these days are so tender and so easily offended that they think they have a right to never read or hear anything they dislike. Meanwhile, I doubt anyone is going to give a real answer to why you can't handle this yourself, because there is no good reason for that.
From idiots who wait on hold on technical support lines to ask questions that are documented in the manual, the help file, the README file, the Web site, and the FAQ (so that people who really do need a technician get to wait), to people who have no creative capacity and cannot solve their own mundane problems, I really wonder what the hell is wrong with people.
When you "Ask Slashdot" a very open-ended question like this, you're going to get many different answers. If you show some initiative and Google it, you're going to get
So what did you gain from making a "gee everybody let's come together" big deal out of it, exactly, that you could not have done on your own? Why must you be so helpless that you can't deal with this unassisted? Don't you understand that this lack of self-sufficiency is a handicap that, unlike most handicaps, you can choose whether you have it?
This will get modded down because, OHMYGOSH it might OFFEND someone! Oh Noes, what will we do
I tend to agree: using tags, you're not limited to disjoint sets.
Intersections are quite common in real life, and designing the perfect category tree is not easy nor fast. Even when you succeed, you're always running the risk of being confronted with a new item that doesn't fit in your tree, or would need a complete tree redesign to fit in well (see biology).
However, tag systems usually are "all-flat" (Gmail is anyway): there is no notion of sub-category.
If you're going to have dozens of tags, this is going to be messy too...
Until I thought about the ability to have multiple tags on an item. Essentially, with tagging you have the full power of set arithmetic. A hierarchical scheme can be considered a strict subset. If you have INBOX, with a subfolder called 'Bank', and a subfolder called 'Credit', you can acheive the same thing by tagging the same message both 'bank' and 'credit'. The 'subfolder' would now represent the set intersection of the two tags. True, all your groups are visiibile from the top level, but a UI could none the less have a drill-down with set notation and acheive the same effect as hierarchical organization.
So tagging can have that power, it's a matter of UI design to make it as convenient.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
(Actually I agree with other posters who say this is just a normal application for an email list, let people do whatever they want, but the OP ruled that out?)
There's been some good email-oriented suggestions but maybe you'd also like to consider a private forum, setup on an in-house system (takes minutes with a CMS like Joomla and fireboard) where you can create sub-categories as required, contribute to multiple issues with an nice visual overview of all live topics and see a complete threaded history of all discussions.
An added benefit is that if all connections are secured (https) then provided the core system is setup properly, all correspondence is safe from prying eyes compared to plain-text emails flying across teh Internets (assuming you are not encrypting your emails).
Throw in a file repository system (remository under Joomla?) and you have a central location for all key files, which means you eliminate the headache of multiple versions attached to (insecure) emails.
AT&ROFLMAO
If you think about it, folders are just tags with restrictions placed on how many "tags" a message can have. So anything you wanted to do with folders or tags can be done with tags; it gives you more fexibility. In reality, the computer is not actually moving the data around anyway, just re-"tagging" the pointers to the data and enforcing those restrictions. I would say go with tagging, but then I'd also say go with Google Apps and / or Google Groups and either set up a mailing list (in Apps) or one private group that everyone has access to.
... because the are always the most valuable.
Currently, I'm completely unclear as to what kind of information you are attempting to organize here.
You imply you communicate with each other via e-mail, you say you communicate with the student body via e-mail. Fine, so what exactly is the purpose of these myriad nested folders? What is the organizational problem you are trying to solve?
There is absolutely no reason to share emails in this organization.
The secretary's job is not just the completion of the minutes. But to organize and forward on information that is required for the board. Information that is supposed to represent the boards point of view should go through the same single point.
Ad hoc access to, filtering of, replying to and otherwise manipulating the email is broken. One of the symptoms of that brokenness is the problem you are seeing now.
Fix the culture, the rest will follow.
One way to use tags in this scenario (I haven't, but I've contemplated it) is that you can use them to indicate what items some of you need to read or have read. You might need 10 new tags for this: person(x)-unread for each person in your group. A rule can be set up so that all incoming email is tagged with person-unread for all the people in the group. Whoever reads an email first can categorize it properly, and can also remove their unread tag. Setup a filter for each person, so that they can see the items tagged unread for them. I'm not sure how you would do this just with folders, but it lets you solve the problem (which you might not be suffering from) of emails getting lost.
HAW! HAW! You misspelled "lookout."
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Let's see if anyone notices.
If your fellow directors can't be bothered to properly sort the traffic as they like it, chances are any solution you come up with for them ultimately won't work. Well organized chaff is still chaff.
It's an interesting question, kind of, but it doesn't seem worth a front page link.
I also manage e-communication at a university for a large student group (13-person exec board & 40+ non-exec members). Each exec member has his own committee to communicate with as well as the entire exec board. This year my university adopted Google Apps, and most of our members had Google accounts anyway. So we had each exec member use either their own personal Google account or a university google account. All e-mails or organized privately by each individual in his own account. Google Docs is where we do most of our collaboration. This means that there's no work for me to keep each person organized because that's his own responsibility, and people have the freedom to organize their tags or folders as they please. I don't even have to manage sharing rights--each exec member chooses with whom to share all his own Google Docs documents and spreadsheets.
The point: I highly recommend going with Google: Gmail+chat, Google Docs, Calendar, and Google groups (which I use heavily in another student group). You could have your group e-mail automatically forward to each person, or you can have your group email be a Google Groups email address.
The major draw back of this approach: learning curve. Don't underestimate people's desire to keep doing things the way they've always done it. Just adopting a strategy doesn't solve the problem. it's not that people are lazy or dumb. They're just trying to manage their time efficiently. If you want to transition people to a new system, you have to work one-on-one with each person.
Yeah, but the ontology problem is going to apply to any system. Searching may be the way to go, but tagging is also quite effective, and the combination of the two is probably the best without making board@organization.org send out to ten private accounts in a small list of sorts.
Lucky Gmail combines tags with great searching, and it sounds like it's already on the table. The good thing with tagging is that since it's not stuck to a single folder, duplicate tags (if you will) aren't going to clog things up too badly or throw off someone else's system - unless a term means two different things to two different people, in which case you really do have to split it into multiple inboxes.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
Ten members in the board of directors? What are you running, California? And none of you can be bothered to actually meet? Man, just fold the damn organization, and give back those student funds you've been drinking.
Is there a mail client for Linux that filters mail the same way as gmail does?
I would like to be able to add several tags to the same mail, but there should be only one folder.
I would like to be able to search through my mail for a text-string.
These searches should be as fast as gmail and scale well for with lots of mails.
why not use the technologies that have been around for ages and were specifically designed for that kind of thing?
"tacked on ad libum."
This phrase bears to Latin the same relation that "el trucko" bears to Spanish.
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
If you all run Windows and proprietary lock-up is not a concern for you, you should try Microsoft Groove.
Its target are small (< 40 people) teams and it can keep synchronized files, calendars, meetings minutes, message board like threads, issue tracking etc.
(I know this is /.)
I'd suggest the folders can be okay if you have a filing system.
My suggestion is that the filing system consist of a folder for each project you are working on, and an archive for folders from past projects.
Don't let yourself have a "miscellaneous" folder, that'll just become a dumping ground for things no-one wants to deal with.
Don't forget to make a few folders for things you might not consider a project, like suggestions for future projects.
So, imagining that you are a kite-flying organization, some example folders:
March-fly-in-2009: Club sponsored flying event to be held on campus
Kite-surfing-class: club arranged class with kite surfing expert
Box-kite-workshop: lets' teach the local elementary students to make and fly box kites
Complaints: Messages we have received that we must address with some useful action.
suppliesApril08: a discussion of needed supplies for the office and the regular kite-making meeting
budget09: talk regarding the budget we have to submit to Student government to get our allowance
archive: Old projects, budghets and supplies discussions
The key to these things is to be brutal about taking care of the mail. Don't keep old projects in the main area, don't lump all projects together, and don't let random crap pile up. If it does move the goals of the organization forward, delete it. Only save old projects so you can see the history of the why's behind your decisions and actions. Don't save the jokes, asides, and complaints about the thread getting offtopic, kill them right away.
Tagging won't help unless you have a plan that sayswhy you are tagging. Having both can be good, because you can use them to set the state of a piece of mail.
Consider this tag set:
Suggestion-to-be-reviewed
Supplies-Committee-todo
classes-committee-todo
Agreements
Actions-done
Information
You could probably come up with others that more fit your situation. The point is to use the tag to indicate what needs to be done with the email. An email containing the final list for the next supply run could be marked with the supplies-todo tag, and when the supplies are acquired, marked with the Actions-done tag.
The goal in this is to have a process by which each email is dealt with as rapidly as possible, by providing the right place for it to be, and maybe some markers to help people find it again if needed. Most importantly, you must make real decisions about what "needed" means. Don't fall into the 12,000 emails trap. Even with a good search function, there are too many things that will be similar, and you'll have to look at 2000 emails to find that one you remember from 2 years ago.
All the technology in the world won't hide your lack of vision, talent, or understanding.
Using either system in the group you described is going to end up being a mess. After a while both systems are going to require somebody to go through and sort them all out manually.
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
When accessing GMail via IMAP, it emulates folders by interpreting a '/' in the tag as the "directory separator". It gives you the flexibility of tags with the organization of folders, if you want it. However, the web interface doesn't do this. And, of course, it doesn't solve the problems others mention with consistent use.
Tags can intermingle You can have multiple tags on one mail, but you can't put a mail in multiple folders.
If you use folders, I suggest you reduce your amount of them to a maximum of three: Important, Archive & Junk. You can even actuallly reduce that to Inbox and Archive. Or make a list of [Name]SawIt folders. The last one in the alphabet is responsible for archiving it into archive. That way you can make sure everyone read the important stuff. Just move it to the next userfolder in line after you've read it.
Bottom line: Folders only make sense if you reduce their amount to a minimum following one single standard that everyone understands in 3 minutes. Tags are more flexible.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
It would make more sense to create a mailing list, and have emails sent to the list forwarded to all ten members. Then they could administer their folders as they see fit.
With 10 people on one email account, it's hardly surprising that it turned into a clusterfuck.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
I'm in charge of the tech aspects of a school group with two email addresses that we accept mail from the public. I've set up an internal Mailman that only board members know about. The two external emails accounts are forwarded to the internal mailman which then sends a copy of the email to all of the people subscribed to the listserv.
I then set up Mail man to munge the reply-to fields so that the reply to field is the same as the private listserv. As a result, we can talk amongst oursevles about something and then when we decide, we simply reply to the original message and bcc ourselves. This works really well because everyone gets a copy of everything, there's no sharing of email accounts, there's no remembering to reply all, etc. Also, spam drops to nearly zero because you can filter the external accounts quite well.
As for the actual organization part...don't you have a set list of what people normally do? If not, usually someone replies to the message and says "hey bob, can you follow up on this?". This system works extraordinarily well.
And it's worth spending some time coming up with an initial set of tags. That, by the way, is taxonomy not ontology. Ontology is about modeling a wider range of relationships than the "is-a"/"has-a" that taxonomy covers.
If the users want to add more tags, that's fine. Closed-ended taxonomies are seldom worth a hit. Unless you're a good-sized enterprise, don't waste time trying to impose a taxonomy on your users. It's costly and requires a lot of process discipline to do right.
Multi-rooted hierarchical tagging works best-- but a "flat" scheme isn't bad either.
Oh, and it's a trivial exercise to create a virtual-folder view based on tags. You can implement it either from a central repository of metadata or by carrying the metadata on the individual mail messages.
Regardless, using folders without tags is generally a lousy solution. Look at all the different and generally piss-poor ways that people organize information on their desktops for an idea of how well that usually works.
Get your teeth into a small slice: the cake of liberty
cake?
You might want to look into using a good wiki system that lets you manage permissions and groups. Take a look at Confluence made by Atlassian, or Clearspace made by Jive (Jive Software also makes a great XMPP server that integrates nicely with Clearspace). One nice feature with Confluence is that it email edits to members of a group automatically, further extending it's reach to your members. I know you can get an academic license for Confluence, and probably one for Clearspace. I've used both products and found them to work great for what you're trying to accomplish.
Just my 2 cents....
Since when did Slashdot become a forum?
Is that Celtic? Otherwise I think you just said "to the cake."
Use Outlook categories. They are the same thing as tags and you can create search folders in Outlook that can act a one-click access to certain topics as a regular folder would, with the added advantage that you can have more than one tag per item (as others have mentioned). Plus, since it's already available in Outlook, you don't have to move your mail over to GMail, giving them the opportunity to capitolize on your content, unless you're into that.
Your setup is completely idiotic. A shared account is just begging to be abused, particularly in a student politics environment.
Email arrives, on an issue which incriminates a board member: "Oh gee, it's been deleted and nobody knows who did it or what it contained." Issue turns up at the local student meeting and details regarding why that dodgy contract was approved: "Golly, looks like that email was removed." Crazy stuff. Unless your cabal intentionally wants to make itself unaccountable, you need to fix that up pronto.
How? Set up a mailing list (using, for example, Mailman) and have it deliver mail to each board member's personal email address. This stuff is trivial for any junior systems administrator. How this got approved as a Slashdot question is a mystery.
My suggestion(which is what worked for me collaborating on my capstone project) is that each person gets a single folder with their name on it.And then tags will be used in the central workspace for any projects and also each individual is allowed to tag the emails in his/her own folder as they wish. This gives everyone their own workspace and allows them to organize that workspace how they like,while at the same time giving all a central workspace for ongoing collaborative projects. This also cuts down on arguing about layout as everyone gets their own little niche to set up as they please and you only have to get them to agree to a few common tags for the common workspace. Our common tags were IIRC "things we would like to have"
Anyway our system really helped us to get a handle on things while allowing each individual to organize his personal area to what suited him best. Oh,and when you have meetings a similar approach works well in real life. We had our area set up in a Round Robin configuration which allowed those of us with laptops to easily share them with the two that didn't while zinging ideas off each other and at the same time giving us a central area where one of us could go and stand when he wanted to present an idea to the group while having their undivided attention. But I guess it would all depend on your group dynamics so YMMV.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Neither. Use good search (like Gmail). I use Gmail, and I have never tagged a single message, and I have always been able to find the message I want on the first search. A search engine basically adds tags to files. If you have a good search engine, then you won't have to add tags by hand.
http://www.taglocity.com/
Seems to be what you are looking for?
All 10 of them use the same email account? The problem is far from solved... This is strait out of WTF.
With 10 people on one email account, it's hardly surprising that it turned into a clusterfuck.
Hear, hear!
Corporate emails at my work consist of endless top-posting after re-top-posting that must be read from the bottom to the top to make any sense of the mess. In the process, I need to skip over multiple re-inclusions of the same email, and not get annoyed that the entire mess mostly consists of disclaimers. LookOut seems to strongly encourage this technique of mis-communication.
"What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant disclaimer."
"What is the disclaimer standing on?"
"But it's disclaimers all the way down!" (sorry Stephen Hawking.)
Time to move out of the 90's and setup even a simple incident tracking system. An email system lacks reporting and accountability.
Um, LookOut is a search addon for Outlook. Are you blaming all that miscommunication on one of the two decent search addons?
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
LookOut is what you do when you use OutLook.
Personally I think joint accounts are normally a terrible idea. They are extremely difficult to maintain since (supposedly) everyone is responsible. In my experience if everyone is supposed to be responsible then in reality no one is actually responsible. Tragedy of the commons applies here. Everyone trusts someone else will deal with it and it becomes a big old mess.
With all the organizational emphasis these days placed on "teams" (a term that makes me a little sick), you'd think that making a simple mailing list would be the most obvious choice, as ShieldW0lf points out.
Better yet (at least for me) is the old bulletin board model. Even with most mailing lists, I find myself ignoring a lot of the incoming messages, mostly because most of them aren't important to me.
With a simple forum-style bulletin board, I can zero in on what's important, what's recent, what's meant for me, and what the most important members of the "team" have written.
I find I am still the most reliable navigator of the incoming information flow in most organizations, and certainly in a group of 10.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Admit it, you wanted GMail way before you posted this.I say go for it, I wish our school had the luxury of having email but those jack-asses refuse to let us students acess anything even remotely related to email... good thing I know ways around all that.
I am a lowly high school student... please dont assume im an expert.
There are any number of collaborative group sites from Google Groups, Yahoo Groups, and Airset; any of which is a better choice for your purposes. All allow the individual member to get emails, notifications of postings and other information as they choose. All provide for easy posting of text and files for group distribution. This is like using a screwdriver for a screw instead of a hammer.
If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? If not now, when?
Firstly, what are you trying to do?
If it is "discussion between a group of people" then email is the wrong solution. That's what nttp was invented for - threaded discussions. Even a modern blog/bbs will do a better job.
Secondly, part the secretary's job is summarise and communicate the businesss and decisions of the board. And _sometimes_ the reasons for the decisions. If you can't write minutes, have a dedicated blog. With a printed hardcopy filed with your departmental/faculty secretary.
On that front, trusting Google with your records is like trusting Microsoft with your DRM' music.
-- Butlerian Jihad NOW!
Thats exactly what I do. We have a mailing list for Board members, Officers and Volunteers. It allows them to chat and discuss topics and lets them organize (or delete) items they no longer want. The mailing list also archives them, should anyone need to go back and review the history or find something they accidentally deleted.
Simple answer to your question - Yes, use Gmail.
If you are looking to completely revise how you use email, I am sure there are 100 ways to accomplish it (and some suggestions here are helpful). However, it seem like the current system is working fairly well for you (and your colleagues) and you just want to streamline it somewhat.
You can do this by using Gmail with their "tags" but, more importantly, the ability to never have to delete anything and search everything.
Good luck!
Go away and read "The Art of Getting Things Done" by David Allen. It would have been mentioned here earlier, but most of its proponents are likely off... getting things done.
Then Google for a presentation called "Inbox Zero" which takes the GTD ideas and applies them to email.
Now, watch this post get modded up by the cult of GTD.
Do you or your partner snore? - Visit www.snoring.com.au
Join the club of big boys and girls and actually show up for your meetings. Otherwise make way for people who actually have time to devote to your organization. Obviously you do not have proper dedication to the group.
What could possibly hurt the security of the American people more than giving our own government the ability to hide its
your email has a severe case of disclaimerrhoids?
The Problem is that email wasn't intended to have 10 users per address.
The best way to go would be to try out a "support ticket system."
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
I'm a member of a group that's done both-we've got 20/30 people who have access to one acct. (don't ask, gotta be that way.) There's a separate mailing list for discussions. Originally it was a folder for what each person had to take care of-now tags for person and content. The way tags are kept consistent is that on list the guidelines are set for what each tag means. Both work well enough-you've just gotta make sure that if you do use a folder system that the members tag everything, and if possible archive. Otherwise the inbox is gonna be incredibly cluttered and you'll never find anything.
open source modern art: laser taggi
As others have suggested or hinted at, is to quit sharing one email account, either for communication between 'board members', or with 'the student body'.
I think a Google Group would work far more efficiently. Each 'board member' would have their own account, and have some administrative access. the masses would have less access. If there are recurring cases where you need to communicate to all 'board members', but privately (eg without the student body reading that communication), then perhaps two groups, one for internal messages between members, and a seperate one for 'public messages'
This reminds me of a sig I used to see, ironically, on an Outlook Admin mailing list:
"There are seldom good technological solutions for behavioral problems" (Ed Crowley)
Use a wiki.
Your organisation appears to adhere to a "shared information repository" culture. Email was not designed with this culture in mind. You use the wrong tool for the wrong purpose. With email, every person and/or every role within the organisation should have a unique email address (eg john@example.com or sales@example.com, the second being just a forwarding address). If more than any person (save for the admin) has access to someone else's email then the system is broken.
Wikis can fit in your culture quite well. Essentially a wiki is a repository of information divided in pages that can be accessed and edited by anyone. Certain wiki packages also allow you to control who can edit which pages (DokuWiki has ACL support, MediaWiki also has some restriction features).
So what I suggest is to keep emails strictly tied to specific persons or roles, and use an internal wiki for coordinating your work. If you want to share an email with a colleague just forward it. If you need to share an email with everyone, just copy it into the wiki (or set up a system where forwarding the email to a specific address will have it posted on the wiki automatically).
In short, use email for communicating with a specific individual, and use the wiki for communicating with the whole team.
Disclaimer: As a consultant I set up wiki systems for enterprises (albeit for the moment I am nearly fully busy with other projects).
Now, this is just my opinion... but to me e-mail is a transitive communication medium. When I read this it sound to me like the electronic equivalent of running this board using post-it notes. It sounds to me like you need documents where ideas are captured. Not the raw ideas in a box somewhere (or on post-its).
- I am made of meat.
TIAEAE!
I've seen a LOT of dumb "ask slashdot" questions before, but this one takes the cake. shared email accounts? wtf? I cannot comprehend when or why someone would think this was a good idea. from your post it's not working out very well... perhaps you should take that as a BIG FUCKING HINT that you're using email completely wrong. no two people should ever be sharing one account. I feel far dumber just for having read this moronic question. DUMB DUMB DUMB DUMB DUMB
Let me guess, "secretary" was thought to have too much anti-feminist connotations?
:)
In the meantime, even Google has trouble helping me pin down the exact meaning of that word! An unusual occurance. I wonder if in the far future, there will be a special word for "the feeling one gets when searching/consulting the collective intelligence doesn't answer the question"? I think I just felt its puny echo from the future.
Hmm, about the only info in English is by automatic translation of an entry in the Dutch Wikipedia, which leaves me wondering...
Use Thunderbird with IMAP. Search is practically instantaneous, so you don't have any need for sub-folders or tags.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
I advise student organizations as a professional in Student Affairs, and I do have to say that I'd be rather annoyed if I found out that one of the organizations I advise was doing this. A mailing list would be ideal for this situation; I don't know if your university makes them available to student organizations (mine does), but even a Google Group or another free mailing list would be better than your current system, if you insist that everyone has to have access to exactly the same information. In most organizations I advise that have that number of executive officers or directors that yours does, they have other members who are tasked with sorting incoming information and forwarding it to the other members of the executive board; for our SGA and activities board, it's the secretary. Talk to your adviser about the mail issue.
Um, LookOut is a search addon for Outlook. Are you blaming all that miscommunication on one of the two decent search addons?
College-Pages.com - Online Colleges, Degrees, and Programs
there is a commercial product that does this very well both for email and any kind of document. It's sold by Recommind and goes by the name of Decisiv. We are using it in a very large organization of knowledge workers and are finding it incredibly useful for sharing information securely and intuitively.
http://www.basecamphq.com/
http://www.37signals.com/
You can add members to Basecamp, send messages / announcements to members, create overall tasks and assign tasks to individual members, etc. I think this system would work much better than the existing email based system
I use Google Groups to manage the body corporate committee of my block of units. We have about 7 members on the board and they all have access (although most just rely on the email forwarding feature to read and submit posts). It is good for us because it keeps all email conversations archived in threads related by subject matter plus is completely searchable (as you'd expect for a Google service - as well as free!).
Tags are obviously a great way to flag topics of common interest and track them. Although as another posted suggested, a forum seems like a better tool for this purpose.
Which leads me to this question: is there any hosted service that provides either email or forum that gives detailed and accurate read-tracking? I have a need for two parties to communicate, and to legally prove when each party reads a given message. Return receipts in traditional email are a joke. I've googled quite a bit, and other than a couple of pricey "registered email" services, I have come up empty handed. (Third party is preferable, since if I host it myself, I can be accused of faking the information.)
Thanks...
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
I concur. Folders are like tagging an item only once. With tags, you can place multiple tags on items, which is analogous to it being in multiple directories, but yet only one copy is stored.
I will top post until you are blue in the face, and then some :-)
For our group (company, actually) the best answer was a forum. Though there are many open source programs available (phpBB is a good example), having managed a large forum for several years I must say that I've found vBulletin to be the best for ease of management.
Top posting is better, with bottom or inline I have to scroll through 18 screens of text to find the remark. Top posting means I only have to read a few lines of text (conveniently those lines shows up in the preview pane), In cases of extreme information overload I might have to scroll a scren or two to get some context. The best thing is Its all there in cronological order, no problem forwarding to a topic expert or cc some more (sorry individuals with overfull mailboxes) to join the fun.
Log in to Gmail, then go to Settings / Accounts / Add another e-mail address.
Each person will get a unique email address but the email can all be accessed and sorted by person or keyword through one central account.
hi
use something like RT
Hi,
Most of the advice you are receiving, while good and well intentioned, does not seem to match the situation you are facing.
You receive emails from students (and perhaps other organisations) and at least one member of your committee needs to take action on each individual email. If you insist on using a joint account: create an individual folder for each of the committee members, when an email comes in either an employed secretary or whoever from the committee happens to be reading the messages at the time should read the message and decide which committee member should (by job description) or is most likely to (if you guys are really disorganised) be the correct person to deal with that particular message. The message should be moved into the relevant committee member's folder and when they login they can see it and act on it.
If you are an organisation which employs a secretary then there's no real need for you to even employ folders. Mail comes into the central account and instead of moving it into a committee member's folder the secretary should instead forward it to the committee member's separate email account. This allows the committee member to re-forward the message to another member if they need help on it and it will (usefully) appear as an unread message to the other committee member.
At the risk of provoking flame bait, I have to say if you guys have problems with this system then email is the least of your organisational worries. Speaking as someone who's involved in similar activities, this idea is based around demarcation of responsibilites (or members' areas of interests if you're a more ad-hoc organisation).
Good luck with it,
dave.