[Techtalk] email policy problem

Jennifer Scalf jscalf at pegasus.rutgers.edu
Wed Jul 21 17:03:35 EST 2004


On Wed, 2004-07-21 at 12:02, 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.
> 
> 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).

This is the part that stuck me. 

If you know that a piece mail should be answered by one person (because
of the sender's email address I guess) then why not have a procmail
recipe for the other 5 that puts that mail into a secondary folder and
not their inbox? 

That way each person will get only their critical email in their inbox
and the email that is still important, but not their critical
responsibility, in that other folder.

It would be very clear to the people what their responsibility is also. 

> 
> 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.
> 
> 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.
> 
> We are currently using Outlook with IMAP email (on the desktop PCs) off 
> a Linux server.
> Ideas?
> 
> thanks in advance



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