How to keep all the members of a shared mailbox in the loop when answering to a mail sent to that shared mailbox?

[pagaille (Matthieu Gaillet)]

@pike

Nobody will stop to let you use a spoon for opening cans

And do me a favour : show me the right tool !

[pike (Michael Kicks)]

I hoped the joke could make you laugh, was not my intention to piss you off. If that happened i’m sorry. I was listening to Alanis Morrisette’s Ironic… and this helped me to put words out.

@pagaille

I only want a team of some people in a small company to be able to manage a generic public email address (info, billing, support) in a way that they are able to see if and what someone answered.

I wrote it: ticketing system.

Shared mailbox works only if:

• all involving mail clients are correctly configured
• all involving users are correctly acting the way is meant

or

• no personal mailboxes alternatives are available for users

Configuring mailfilter (procmail? sieve? who knows) to auto-cc every outgoing email for users and shared mailbox could be broken or messed by user-created mailfilters.
If you want to keep using shared mailbox and still doing the same thing for me it won’t work. So this is not a tool-related problem, but an organizational or user problem.

If people behaviour cannot be improved and the tool won’t fit… My hint is change the tool. @stephdl told that email is a stone-age tool. I don’t agree but he’s right, is older than SMS and MMS, which are sold as “obsolete” from mobile companies: mailserver can act as a transport for a lot of applications (mail messages are used for managing groupware communications like schedules and contact sharing) so this could also be used for feed a ticketing system for every message that the address related to the shared mailbox will receive.

Create a ticket queue for info requests and billing management seems an overkill, but…

• it will keep tracking who did what and when, without asking to anyone if people involved is out of office for any reason
• it will collect statistics, evaluating time for manage a request and the satisfaction of the requests received
• it will allow analysis and evaluation of the skills and access needed for complete a ticket, therefore “boring and easy requests” could be assigned to newbies, external users, temporary people (writing the right kind of documentation to complete the job)

And this approach could be also used for track quotations requests.

Hope this helps for… find a good solution for you, @pagaille

[LayLow (HF)]

Maybe this helps https://wiki.nethserver.org/doku.php?id=zammad

[pagaille (Matthieu Gaillet)]

@pike

I hoped the joke could make you laugh, was not my intention to piss you off.

No worries, I wasn’t pissed off

@pike

Create a ticket queue for info requests and billing management seems an overkill, but…

I better see your point now. I’ll investigate.

@LayLow

Maybe this helps https://wiki.nethserver.org/doku.php?id=zammad

Thanks @LayLow !

[pagaille (Matthieu Gaillet)]

Zammad is extremely convincing, thanks !

I still believe that it’s a bit overkill for a simple generic email but I’ll give it a go. Thanks to @mrmarkuz’s module it’s extremely easy to start.

Thanks again for sharing your knowledge and insights.

Matthieu

[pike (Michael Kicks)]

So @pagaille what was the… result of your experience?

[pagaille (Matthieu Gaillet)]

Not implemented yet…

I still believe that for very simple configurations that’s a bit overkill to “only” keep colleagues updated when working together on a so-called Shared Mailbox.

But IMHO the concept of shared box in Dovecot is not really useful either as is.