On Friday, March 3 at 12:44 PM, quoth Derek Martin:
Say you have a mailing list that needs to be monitored by the group. Responsibility rotates on a daily basis. I want to keep all the mails for which I was responsible for responding for the last week (or month or whatever). I want to delete mails on days I'm not responsible for monitoring. I think you'd be hard-pressed to write a limit which will accomplish that...But if I get my own personal copy of the messages, I can save or delete them as I see fit.
Of course you can invent situations where a mailing list will be more appropriate. But that doesn’t say anything about the case you’re trying to make, which is that mailing lists are ALWAYS more appropriate.
I imagine it could be used as an efficient and handy reference for things like “the last month worth of filtered daily log files” or something like that.Sure, you could use that as an archive. And that seems like the only sensible way to use shared folders to me, and there are (IMO) better solutions, like web archives.
I have yet to see a mailing list web archive that I didn’t think would be far more useful to me if I could only access it through mutt. The sorting generally sucks, the searching REALLY sucks (try searching your local mailman mailing list archive for messages from yourself with “foo” in the body that were sent before september 2005 but after march 2005—and if you find a web archive system that can do that, is it really more convenient than mutt?), there is no “limit” function, I can’t copy messages I like (particularly from before I started subscribing to that mailing list) into a personal collection of “useful” mailing list postings, etc.
(plus you don’t have to implement all the fancy searching and filtering for the webserver that people may want for viewing because such things already in most mail readers).There are already plenty of software packages for maintaining and searching mailing list archives... no implementation necessary.
Which ones are you thinking of? I know of the ones wrapped around ezmlm and mailman, and both of them stink. I also know about the ones my school uses (wrapped around majordomo) and they stink worse than either of the others.
Another idea might be to use a shared folder as a sort of group to-do list where the things that need to be accomplished are posted and then deleted when they’re done.Could be, but there are also better solutions for this too. There are any number of groupware apps that do this, and there's probably plenty of web-based to-do list apps that you can download for free, if that's all you need.
The University of Bath, according to their webpage (http://www.bath.ac.uk/bucs/email/sharedmailbox.shtml), uses shared mailboxes most commonly for contact addresses (e.g. admissions@xxxxxxxxxx or psychology-enquiries@xxxxxxxxxx) where multiple people are in charge for replying to the messages, but where the extra falderall of message redistribution using a mailing list is not only unnecessary but inconvenient. Additionally, the shared mailbox messages do not contribute to personal mail quotas, and encourages people to make more of a distinction between personal email and business email.
Imagine, for example, that you have a contact address that has developed a bit of a backlog because your company just released a new product and you’re getting a lot of inquiries about it but you’re a little short-staffed. To deal with the backlog, you hire some more public relations folks. If you’d set up your contact addresses as transparent internal mailing lists, your new employees cannot help respond to the backlogged messages without copying-and-pasting text from some internal mailing list archive webpage (and then, of course, the In-Reply-To headers are all broken), and unless you’ve got a particularly fancy bit of mailing list software, knowing which messages have already been responded to requires careful documentation by all the employees that had been working on responding earlier. If you were merely giving them access to the shared folder of all the backlogged messages, your new employees can start up immediately replying to messages in the backlog. I suppose you could implement a shared folder type system as a webpage and give your employees a web form to respond with, or maybe you could go out and get yourself some sort of a tracker system and shoe-horn that in. You may even enjoy doing so, but it doesn’t feel like an “optimal” way of doing it to me.
~Kyle --You never truly understand a thing until you can explain it to your grandmother.
-- Albert Einstein
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