Ask HN: How to manage shared Email inboxes?

3 pointssudders7y ago2 comments

Next to our private company email addresses, we have 2 shared email inboxes (info@...) that are being worked on by multiple people at the same time.

This is currently done in GSuite, simply by multiple people logging in at the same time. The volume of the emails in these inboxes are starting to get out of hand, and we are looking for a way of managing this differently.

The conversation view in Gmail is becoming somewhat of a hassle for certain situations, as its not always clear when a client replies to an email multiple times in a conversation flow, to what the client was replying in the first place. We tried not using conversation folding at all, but this is completely unmanageable as we are receiving too many emails a day.

I was wondering what the experiences of HN is with similar situations, Im mostly interested in self-hosted, cloud applications or addons for GSuite. As I do no want to install software on computers.

2 comments

mtmail7y ago

Next step is software allowing one user to assign tasks (emails) to another and which keeps one thread per customer. https://frontapp.com/, https://missiveapp.com/, https://www.intercom.com/inbox and such.

ktpsns7y ago

I made good experiences with issue trackers. Kind of leading is probably OTRS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OTRS -- it's open-source despite the horrible website which I won't link here) and RT. However, also software like https://trac.edgewall.org/ and https://www.redmine.org/ provide E-Mail interfaces which work quite well.

The thing with issue trackers is: They are made exactly made for a use case as you describe it. They excel for managing the contact "workflow" with clients, especially if different people work on the same "inbox".

In my experience, Introducing an issue tracker to a team always took some days to weeks of familiarization, but it always paid off.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse