Email transparency

I realize that newsgroups have received much, much less attention than email recently, and it may just be that there isn't enough software support for news to make it worth bothering with, but it does seem like a mailing list with archives is a lot like what news was trying to accomplish. (The only other big difference I can think of is push vs. pull notifications. But newsgroup readers can fetch all new messages, so I don't think that's a big deal.)

In general, email is now being seen (as often remarked by ShowHN MVPs) as To Do lists, and in a tech shop, multiple people have an interest in that process. This results in unenforceable policies about To: vs Cc: and unwieldy threads you're never sure if you should delete the tail nested indent history from. As the ShowHN projects assert, email's a poor To Do list tracker.

To refine that slightly, emails tend to be requests.

You don't create a new email thread to give yourself a To Do item. You create a new email thread to ask someone for something. The recipient doesn't care about your agenda. You're the interested party asking, and you need to track your requests.

Employees and clients email requesting action from someone: do this for me, let me do this for you, give me a resource, read this, take action on this, file this, and of course, receive a copy of this to cover my ass. Your To Do items (emails) are now in their lists (inboxes), and once there, you've lost control over the prioritization and handling of them. You'll probably lose visibility too, the moment you stop getting CC'd on your own email thread.

So, we quit using email.

Instead, we use Request Tracker, tracking all those requests. Instead of the Inbox, we have the RT dashboard, backed by automation with full extensibility:

    http://bestpractical.com/rt/screenshots.html
    http://bestpractical.com/rt/features.html
    http://bestpractical.com/rt/extensions.html

If someone on a team has a family emergency, it's no issue, as anyone else on the team can take over that person's tickets till they're back, and immediately see the whole history.

All this is public within the company and fully searchable, going back about a decade.

When I said above we quit using email, I lied!

We actually all use email, but what we're emailing are RT tickets. So throughout the day, we can use any email capable device in the world to interact with this shared request handling history. RT automates the history and the cc lists. You can search your own requests using your email client, or hit the web interface to search everything. Through the web interface we enjoy the benefits of the dashboard summary, automatic response SLA monitoring, cross linked issue tracking, and visibility/searchability by everyone.

Note that RT can pick apart email addresses and subject lines, so you can route all your RT queues through a single Gmail account if you want, spam protecting your system and giving you a master archive searchable using Google's search tools as well.

Stripe is essentially slowly reinventing Best Practical's Request Tracker. Might be worth giving RT a try.

We like using email for most of our tasks too. We use our own product GrexIt's (http://grexit.com) Shared Labels to share information and even collaborate right from our email inbox. Shared labels allow you to share particular Gmail label among a group of people in your company. Every email conversation on which a shared label is applied gets pushed to the user's inbox who were part of the shared label. All followup emails that arrive in an ongoing conversation also keep getting shared automatically. This approach requires minimal effort to share information and works better than lists. Most importantly users continue to access information from their inbox itself.

We use the shared labels approach for a variety of use cases like support and development. As soon as support email arrives to the support@ email-id it get shared with everyone. We have shared labels with every team member's name, say Task:John. To assign an email to someone, we simply apply the user's shared label on that email. This allows us to collaborate easily without needing any 3rd party tools