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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?"
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.
Use both. Problem solved.
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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.
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).
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.
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?)
... 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?
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
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.
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.
I agree. Email was meant for point to point communication. It is not a group collaboration tool. You system is failing because you are trying to use the wrong tool for the job. Use this as an oporuity to migrate to a better tool entirely.