Our company couldn't do that, and I wonder if IT could even do that. For some projects it might be useful, but our big problem is getting emails read. I can't see that making that better, and I can see that making that worse.
Our group has an email address that I automatically filter to its own box. That's 200 emails, mostly automated, a day. Other people are apparently not filtering--I have no fucking idea how they're coping, because most of those do not need to be read. But when I talk about automatically rerouting the status-quo-is-a-okay mail off somewhere, they look at me blankly.
However, *all* our email is archived. If I can justify the use of their time, I can ask someone to look up the email that Joe sent me on September 15th, 2011 at around noon about the timesheets system, since I deleted it long ago. Everything lives for at least seven years--in practice I'd estimate longer, since I'm not aware of a disposal policy, although I consider them mandatory.
My company does make wide use of "public" shared Outlook folders, but most of the permissions are set to disallow anyone outside the relevant departments from seeing the contents. But within my little 4-person team, we more or less do read all of each other's work-related emails, because it's all archived to the folder.
I also have strong feelings that these:
foo-archive@: Email that you want to grant other people read access to, but don’t have any real expectation of them reading. Use this for email that would traditionally be off-list, whether due to volume or being targeted to a particular recipient or just being generally uninteresting.
emails should not be sent at all.
I have strong feelings that 90% of emails should not be sent at all.
What Megan and Jessica said.
It depends on what you're using for project archival. If you're really saving all emails, that may be the documentation you need to save instead of a Word doc, etc, that no one reads now, but someone might need three personnel changes down the line to explain the rationale about A, B, and F.
Something
inorganic needs to be institutional memory, and I find every company I've worked for has been really bad at that--not only are all the answers not written down, the reasons for the answers have to be recreated from scratch, and that's often impossible. That kind of trail would be *gold* for me in my particular installation.
I am entirely frustrated with the unreading of emails at my office, because I have honestly never sent anyone anything I don't think they shouldn't have. But oh-so-many times to I have to repeat it many more times than once because they don't read it at all. And then, next month, it'll be like the email and the explanation of the email had never happened.
It's not like they're going to the shared drive or SharePoint or any of the other places you'd hope.
I'm going to need to be spoon fed the impact of that.
I totally agree that low value emails just shouldn't be sent!
I've opted out of nearly every list I was on and have been so good about shipping finished emails to appropriate folders that my sent box is empty and my inbox has 4 messages in it. Which makes it glaringly obvious that these are things I don't want to deal with.
In re: transparency and email sharing...when I was at the Apple store, the nice tech tried to explain the benefits of using 'the cloud', including "You can store your contacts there!"
I'm a therapist no effing way I'm putting information 'out there.'
He: "It's totally safe!"
Me: ...
It's hard enough keeping information safe at home.
Does anyone have the Sonos speaker system? I'm intrigued by their soon to be released Playbar. But not intrigued by the price. I'm wanting to replace my 1989 receiver. And I realize, about all I play through it these days is the TV. Playbar has optical in. Perfect! But price is a bit high. Then to add wireless surrounds, it's another chunk of change. And for sub, another big chunk of change. I want good sound. But, not sure I can afford THAT good for the home.
