[Techtalk] email policy problem

[Devdas Bhagat]

On 21/07/04 09:02 -0700, Meryll Larkin wrote:
> 7/21/04
> 
> I'm looking for solutions/suggestions to an email problem at the company 
>   in which I work - I'm curious about if there are others with similar 
> situations and how you solve them or how you would solve them.

Would abuse desks count? The response time is normally 24 hours, though
a fully staffed abuse desk at an ISP has a response time of a few
minutes.

About a thousand mails per day, 800 of which are spam that must be waded
through (No, you cannot ever filter an abuse address).

> One division in my company (between 6 & 10 employees) receive about 300 
> pieces of mail daily, some of it extremely time critical (requiring 
> responses within 2 hours).
> 
> Most of the email is the same mail distributed among all 6 people, 
> although only one person has to respond, and that person is 
> pre-determined according to the sender/source of the email, the others 
> need to receive the email in case that primary responder is out sick, 
> taking a lunch break, or in a remote workstation doing things other than 
> email (due to the possibility of the email being time-critical).

Can you make templated boilerplate responses? That should help you out a
bit there.
IF not, then leave only the current mail in the inbox. All handled mail
is moved out of the inbox. This leave a much smaller mail volume to run
through at one shot. And each mail handled leaves a smaller number.
Positive reinforcement.

> We have no control over the senders.  Sometimes their English is very 
> poor, sometimes the person who sends the emails changes regularly, so we 
> cannot tell the senders to mark certain communications urgent - the 
> determination of whether or not the communication is urgent is made when 
> the email is received and read.

How about using a system like Request Tracker? Not exactly the best
example, but it works.

> The problem is the volume of email is increasing.  The users on my end 
> have trouble finding things, sorting through the email, because there is 
> so much volume.  These are NOT high tech people.   We are looking for a 
> solution that will make things less confusing for them.

So reduce the volume in the inbox. And treat all messages with equal
priority (2 hour response for everything).

Devdas Bhagat