Sharing EmailHere's an unpleasant project: two or more computers checking the same email account. Now make sure they are synchronized so that the people checking on each computer don't double-reply or ignore an email thinking another replied to it. Yeah, not fun. This is a common request from office staff. They may have an address like "sales@myoffice.com" that has no particular owner designated for it. The manager then decrees everyone should check the sales email account and answer questions from customers. It must be great to make decisions without having to worry about whether they are impossible or not. My suggestions for POP email: POP email is the normal email you know and love. You fire up Outlook or another mail application and download your messages. POP email was meant to work with just one computer, this is the type of email most people use, so odds are good when you get the sharing request that this will be what you have to work with. All mail programs have a setting called "Leave Messages on Server" and usually specify a few days or weeks for this to happen. With this setting on you can check email from a second computer and it will download messages again within that time window. So two or more people can check email from one account. However, the computers don't talk to each other so there is no way to know who answered what messages. To deal with this, any reply made should be cc'd back the sales address so that each computer can see the replies sent from the various staff. This would be a lot of confusing work to correlate in a lot of cases, but you can use what is called a "threaded" view of your inbox in any halfway decent email program (in Outlook this is called arranging "by Conversation" in the View menu). This way a reply is lined up with the original question in the inbox and then indented so that you know it was answered. Suggestions for IMAP: IMAP email is rare compared to POP and if you have it, odds are quite good you are aware of that fact. When using IMAP, you don't open Outlook and download messages, instead, Outlook makes a connection to the email server and obtains a list of email there and simply shows it to you. It does download a local copy for speed reasons but from any other computer anywhere you can set up the same account and when you open Outlook it will still show the same inbox, sent messages and other folders. IMAP is great for people who travel a lot but it needs a bit more work on the server end making it less common. Some IMAP servers really bug out if multiple users attach to the same account from different computers so this is a concern as well. If used in a threaded view, all users of the IMAP account see the same sent emails (some email clients need to be configured to save sent messages on the server before this will work). Neither tip will save you if two people type up a quick reply at about the same time and hit send. So here's another option: setup a linux mail server. Linux allows you to execute a script whenever an email comes in on a per account basis, called an .rc script usually. The method varies, but you can configure it to pass the email onto user accounts in a round robin fashion, this way, one question sent to sales comes to John, and the next comes to Sally. And because the script is written by a human being, you can alter it to suit your needs, say if your system needs an RMA number in the subject line for instance. Having said all this, this is not the easy way to go, somebody with excellent Linux knowledge would be needed and you also need control of the DNS for the email system and a place to host it. From a programming standpoint it is pretty simple to write a Java application or PHP script that simply checks the sales account and then does a round-robin forwarding to a list of staff emails, however that assumes you have such a person on staff and a computer available to leave running this software. If you don't have somebody available to code this up for you the cost to hire somebody can be a deterrent. Similar abilities for scripting or batch file processing are available in Exchange Server and Zimbra, which are costly but worth checking out if you run your own servers currently. If you are using a free or ISP supplied email account then you will find sharing it between people is difficult - precisely because it was not designed for this. All Articles |
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