How to stop e-mail deluge (work-related IT-type question)

[Porsche-O-Phile]

I work for a (relatively) small office of eight people which is trying to re-tool itself to handle additional workload of a couple new clients in addition to what we're already handling (which is significant). In discussions with my boss on how to help us all become more efficient, we identified e-mail as a huge time-sucker in the office, which we want to change.

On a given day he (and I, being a senior guy here) get literally DOZENS of e-mails. On a recent two-day hiatus from here, I piled up over 160 in my inbox. Some are important, most are not. Also, as a small office and to keep us "interchangeable" on projects to the extent possible, we've been copying EVERYONE in here on all correspondences as policy. It's ultimately easier for our clients to just hit "send" to a mailing list (everyone here) than try and remember project-by-project who's working directly on that job that week (we do a lot of volume work). The downside is EVERYONE sees EVERYTHING, and the inboxes pile up.

So what's the recommendation by the IT gurus out there? We could (possibly) explore a more "top-down" approach, having a single person (or two) be the point of contact for the clients, but this is inconsistent with our overall business model and will undoubtedly force those "contact" persons (I'd probably end up being one) into a "paper-shuffler" role, which nobody wants.

Any suggestions? Other than spam-filtering all our clients (haha, some days I wish I could!)

[Mule]

Mozilla Thunderbird.

[Christien]

I think what he means is that Thunderbird can group messages by threads, which, while not technically cutting down on the actual number of emails in your inbox, certainly makes it much more organized, presentable and ultimately useful. Plus, it does have excellent spam filters. I get probably 50-75 spam per day and most if not all are caught, except when a new format comes around. Then it takes a couple days of me marking it as junk before it learns the pattern.

[Oracle]

My suggestion is to segregate account and/or group management:
Segregate is basically to create an account that is dedicated for the project, then all of you can add this second account to your outlook, this way your personal inbox is not mixed with operational stuff.
Then dedicate a person to monitor that account and dispatch messages to whoever is responsible, then rotate this task to everyone in the team.
For the customers this is great because they send it to one account and people will read it. Besides they know who is monitoring the that inbox for that week.

For us its working great cause I can't have 15 people reading the same message, that is just a total waste of time.

[Porsche-O-Phile]

Good suggestion - here's another thing I'm wondering (IT types might know better):

On most mail clients there's a setting that gives a particular user the option to either leave a copy of mail messages downloaded from the server (to the client) or to delete them (as is typically the case, since it's now on the local user's machine or network drive). Is there a way to set up a similar thing so the "server" copy will only be deleted once ALL users in a particular group view it? In other words if a mail comes in for a particular job that two of my co-workers and I are all working on, is there any way to set it up (either server or client) so that it'll stay on the server (and be downloadable to each of our client programs) until person #X of X (3 of 3 in this example) gets it, and then it gets purged off the server?

That might help, enabling us to use "mini mailing lists" or something like that. . .

[slodave]

The email that is sent cc'd to each user, is stored in their email file on the server. Each email file has the particular users permissions. No way can one user delete another users email file or individual emails.

Maybe someone else knows differently.

I took care of an engineering company and they had all projects sent to a main address. The projects would then be moved accordingly. At times, an architect would directly correspond during a project to speed things up.

Dave

Originally Posted by Porsche-O-Phile

Good suggestion - here's another thing I'm wondering (IT types might know better):

On most mail clients there's a setting that gives a particular user the option to either leave a copy of mail messages downloaded from the server (to the client) or to delete them (as is typically the case, since it's now on the local user's machine or network drive). Is there a way to set up a similar thing so the "server" copy will only be deleted once ALL users in a particular group view it? In other words if a mail comes in for a particular job that two of my co-workers and I are all working on, is there any way to set it up (either server or client) so that it'll stay on the server (and be downloadable to each of our client programs) until person #X of X (3 of 3 in this example) gets it, and then it gets purged off the server?

That might help, enabling us to use "mini mailing lists" or something like that. . .

[Mule]

Nope Thunderbird has adaptive (learning) spam filtering. Kills 95% of the crap.

[HardDrive]

I think you need to get beyond thinking in terms of e-mail. You need a more robust communications platform.

Take a look a Microsoft Sharepoint. Its an amazing product. Leverage the calandering of Exchange and Sharepoint. Each project or team can be represented by a seperate website. The provisioning processes is very rapid.

Check it out, and feel free to ask me questions. I have done some implementations.

http://www.microsoft.com/sharepoint/default.mspx

Please note that Sharepoint services is a free add-on to server 2003. The enterprise product (MOSS) cost more $$$.

[notfarnow]

Similar situation, we are a group of 9 who oversee the day to day operations of our corporate sites.

We have a shared inbox that all new inquiries/updates are sent to. Within that inbox, we each have our own folders so we can divy up the work as it comes in. If an email is read, moved or deleted it is done for all of us.

Because of the team & workload structure, I need to minitor & track everything that comes through. So, on top of having the shared inbox I am also cc'd (to my inbox) on all incoming messages to the shared inbox. I have a rule applied to rout them to a specific folder.

Rudimentary, but it works. The shared inbox means we always know who's working on what, what hasn't been touched etc... Also allows us to "cover off" for vacation etc. pretty much seamlessly.

I've been on 3 recent projects that used Sharepoint. It is really slick and saves a lot of email & workload hassles.

We're moving towards Sharepoint for our day-to-day operations, but it needs to be set up carefully in order to work ideally... plus everyone using it needs to be properly trained and willing to work with it. In our case, we have difficulty getting marketing (who account for 75% of our workload) to get onboard.

[dhoward]

+1 on Sharepoint.

[Porsche-O-Phile]

I'll check it out, but keep in mind that (1) this is still a small business - Micro$oft products tend to be rather inappropriate for smaller businesses a lot of times, IMO - both in terms of cost, target audience and ease (or lack thereof) of configuration. I'll look into it though. Also (2) this is a production-oriented business (architecture). If we don't ultimately put the resources into the client products, it's wasting money. We get paid for our results, not for proceduralizing our office activities. Any solution here MUST be immediately cost-effective and time-effective, right out of the box.

As a manager-type, I have a very simple view of things like this. I'm totally open to new ideas and suggestions, but ultimately EVERYTHING comes down to this simple reality - EVERY action, decision, policy, procedure or task in business either (1) makes you money or (2) costs you money. If it doesn't do #1, we're not doing it.

The #1 goal of our company is PRODUCTIVITY. We don't want to overly-proceduralize our lives. We tend to give each individual person the responsibility to run their own show, with a minimum of oversight and direction, although there is some overarching responsibility to watch the "big picture" (that's sort of my role). We don't want to have people spending half their day clicking on stuff or updating calendars or project trackers or whatever if it's not directly in service of their getting the jobs done for the clients. That would not help. That stuff is more useful if you're on a huge project with 100 people working on it, but not for a series of short-burn jobs, which is our mainstay. The goal is "lean and mean" - cut down on the clutter/noise and let our people cut through the crap and pound out the products.

We've actually got pretty good spam control through our ISP. I think in the year or so I've been there, I've gotten maybe one or two. That's it.