tough cookie
so i’m trying to whittle away at my work email inbox, which i have been managing with labels and not really filing as a sort of experiment, but now there are over 1500 messages in it, and some have just got to go. i figure if i just spend 20 minutes or so at a time i will conquer it eventually.
anyway this is interesting for other reasons because i’m thinking a lot about email categorization for my capstone.
so i just found this message that is an autoreply that says : “sorry, i don’t work in the bursar’s office anymore. please write someone else from now on.”
what is the best way to handle a message like that?
a lot of my job is actually about remembering who to contact about different things, and the “right” person changes all the time, so this isn’t that rare. but i’m thinking “where can this go where i would actually see it when it is relevant?” the way it usually goes is i remember some conversation i had with someone and figure that’s the person i should talk to, so i search for things about that conversation until i find the person, and i write them. but i don’t always find ALL of the messages from that person, so the odds that i’m going to find this one, telling me to write someone else, are slim. in fact, since i got that message, i Have written this person about something else, but i only just realized it now, and that’s because my inbox is so frickin full that they show up next to each other when i sort by sender. if i had filed the other message away somewhere based on what it was about, rather than who it was from, that couldn’t happen, and even if it could, it makes no sense to think that i would scan All the messages from Every person just in case there’s something like this there.
so what if i was able to attach a note to the address itself? something so that, if i tried to type it again, it gave me a little warning? that could be useful for other kinds of messages, too – i wish i could attach all messages with contact info to the address of the person, so that if i’m wondering what their latest address or their id number is i could just look to see if any of those sorts of messages are attached to the name rather than scouring for them in contact info dumping grounds or gambling on whether i updated the info somewhere else.
that would be great.
but would a better solution to this particular problem be to use more aliases for official stuff like this? i’ve often thought of a scheme wherein iu maintains some kind of central lookup for employees that matches common questions to aliases and then you just always write to that alias no matter who has the job. they have things like bursar@indiana.edu and imuhotel@indiana.edu, but you still end up talking to more specific people most of the time and then that person gets email forever from everyone who ever talked to them, even if they change jobs. or maybe you could make your own aliases, like guytoaskaboutjohn’scontract@indiana.edu, and you would only have to tell it once.
dunno.
there are three real problems here, i guess – the job shifting problem, the not knowing who to ask problem, and then the classification problem that originally got me thinking – how should we handle it when a message isn’t really related to another collection of messages, but to an address?
or a date?
would that be the same?
i’ve struggled with how to file things that were something like “look at me again next thursday”, and that could be addressed by being able to attach the email to the date
or you could just use jminder for that one, i guess (you can pay me royalties, later, josh ;)
so whatever, just thinkin aloud
the question i’m left with is something like: if there are a lot of ways to approach a problem, how do you know which are bandaids and which are getting at the root of the matter? if bandaids are easy do they still have a place? can’t they point to the root in ways that trying to dig it out by just puzzling about it can’t? is there a rule to help tell when they are doing that vs. when they are just holding something together that really should be sold for scrap and started anew?
November 30th, 2005 at 11:26 pm
Interestingly enough, the idea of having a person-independant e-mail that gets to whoever happens to be filling a role and needs to respond isn’t all that new — it’s actually pretty close to how parts of quite a few CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems work.
When you look at places that actually use those types of systems, though, it’s kind of interesting — people generally don’t seem to like them very much. (Common example support@x.com or sales@x.com often goes to a CRM system at many companies where one of several people may wind up responding to the message)
I think one of the big problems with making a system like that work is that it seems trying to fit multiple people into a single identity tends to depersonalize the communication (Regardless of whether it’s an occasional shift of who works in a position at a university or multiple customer service reps grabbing messages off a single queue at once).
December 1st, 2005 at 11:32 am
yeah, i know that multi-person addresses exist, but i’m not really talking about that as much. not in the synchronous sense, at least. i mean addresses that really just point to one person at a time, but then are handed down when people leave so that outsiders don’t need to learn new addresses.
this is what a lot of aliases do now, but it doesn’t work because people end up often just replying to the person who actually responds, because their personal address shows up as the from and reply-to, and then that person is the one that gets lodged in their memory as the one to write. you’re right that this shows that they like talking to people better, but whatever. why can’t the real person come to be associated with even a somewhat sterile alias? sometimes i think the real problem is just that aliases aren’t agressive enough, or something, and it’s too easy for your “real” address to leak through. i’ve used an alias for sugar hill business the past two years and if i’m religious about using it as my reply-to address, people just start saying “kynthia…” when they write to it and it doesn’t seem to be a problem. i can still, however, ship the whole business over to the new coordinator this year and she can simply say “sorry, kynthia’s not here this year, but i’ll help!” and it saves me from having to pay attention and forward things i’m no longer involved in, and it saves them from having to learn a new address.
since you raise the multiple-person support kinds of addresses, though, i wonder if that problem couldn’t be solved by assigning sub-aliases for individual people, so there could be something like support-tim@x.com, and when you reply to a message then people could write back to you directly that way. that’s usually my biggest beef with those sorts of systems. i like that the messages get answered quickly and i don’t really care that i don’t know who will answer them, but then if i want to write back i never quite know who to direct my reply to, and sometimes a lot of repetition is required that is annoying. this way, though, i could write to you personally, but then when you quit support-tim could just go to support-jim or whatever for a while, and he could take over.
this is getting to be a long reply, but that last bit reminds me of a feature of gmail that i keep forgetting, but which david reminded me of last night after the dance. apparently you can do just that – add hyphenated extensions to your gmail address – and they will still reach you, but then you can filter by to: and keep some things out of your inbox. like i could set up kynthia-onlineaccounts (@) gmail (.) com and use it in all web forms, and then filter everything that i get as a result to some nether region that i don’t have to see every day. or lots of other things. i should test that shit out.
December 1st, 2005 at 12:50 pm
I tried testing that shit out – no luck. Did you (or anyone else) get it to work?
December 1st, 2005 at 12:51 pm
Oh, and let me say that only I wish I were the Josh that is responsible for the jMinder. It is a thing of beauty – in the Humean sense in which beauty is equated with functionality and usefulness.
December 1st, 2005 at 1:21 pm
Humean is a funny word that looks like a typo. If his name had been David Human, then would his theories be Humanan?
jMinder is a beautiful little hack in the most loving sense of the word, but it is only a hint of the human/Humean beauty that can be manifested by people contributing their brains to the hci/d revolution (represent! ;)
so go talk to terry winograd when you get back from argentina
:)
December 2nd, 2005 at 10:21 am
the gmail alias thing works, but not with hyphens, with pluses. i just tried out kynthia+test (@) gmail (.) com, and it worked swimmingly.
here’s what helped me figure it out.
have fun!