I believe that the lack of archives in business communication is a serious enough problem to solve. Especially in these times, when a lot of brainstorming happens on email amongst team members located in different geographies.
I've tried using Basecamp for all business communication and succeeded only partially. Although Basecamp can serve as a good archive for email communication, it just doesn't beat the simplicity of adding any random email address to the CC list when you hit "Reply all". You have to first add a user to a project, then add him to the message, and then reply to the message. This, of course, will work only if the person knows how to use Basecamp. Otherwise, add the additional overhead of evangelizing Basecamp over regular email before getting him to accept this new mode of communication. [1] If something confidential is being discussed, there's also this fear of archiving your trade secrets on someone else's servers.
Probably there's a good use-case to add a new feature in SMTP servers -- an archive header and an email archiving module. If an incoming email has the archive header (X-Archive: true) the SMTP server will archive the email by storing a copy of that email and making it accessible on a web page. All replies to that email (and further replies to those emails) will automatically get archived, regardless of whether they have the archive header or not [2]. The server can also add a footer to each email in the thread to direct the user to the archive. Optionally, the archiving module may also archive email attachments and make them available on the company intranet (or the web).
Various mail clients will also need to be modified to present a user with a checkbox while composing the mail that sets/unsets the archive header.
I think this feature can be easily hacked into postfix (or sendmail) and a couple of open source email clients (like Evolution and Thunderbird).
Alternatively, this can also be achieved by having a record-keeper email ID (something like archive@somecompany.com). Any email CCed to the record-keeper will be archived and available on the company intranet (or the web). The only drawback of this is that the archival chain can break very easily if someone removes the record-keeper from the CC list. This approach can probably be an easier path towards implementation, both from the client's as well as the server's side. (Aren't such archival modules already available?)
If anyone wants to collaborate on this project with me, please drop me an email at saurabhnanda (at) gmail (dot) com. I've been wanting to work on a decent tech project for quite some time now.
[1] Given, recipients of Basecamp messages can now simply reply to messages just like normal email, it's still not perfect. All formatting (even line-breaks) are stripped. And you still have to log on to Basecamp to compose a completely new message.
[2] I think it's reasonable to assume that since the parent wanted the email thread to be archived, it must be archived in its entirety.
very valid thought Saurabh and one that i can connect to totally. But there are a few caveats with the SMTP server approach:
ReplyDelete1. Won't the changes need to be done at protocol/standard level so that the SMTP servers implement this.
2. A checkbox can also be forgotten to be checked.
An easier implementation (which can be done at one's own level without carrying out standard wide changes) would be a hybrid-mailing list approach. Most businesses use a "category" mechanism for email, where email is categorized under official, personal, confidential and such. Now, a default mailing list ID could be attached to all the emails that fall under official mails which archives the email thread without having the caveat of someone accidently removing the mailing list ID.
Shantanu, I don't think that the SMTP protocol, per-se, will have to be changed. You can always have an additional header (X-Archive) in the message that implementing SMTP servers can look up. Servers not aware of the additional header will not break - they will simple not archive the message.
ReplyDeleteI've never seen categories in email. How does one do that? Is it some SMTP extension?
Saurabh, I'm not sure "how" they implement the categories thingy, but I've seen this being done for Lotus notes/Domino as well as MS Outlook/Exchange environments in my companies. Maybe this feature is available as off-the-shelf plugin or they customized their servers by developing something using the developers' API.
ReplyDeleteI think it is very doable in the email archiving options. As long as we have the extensions that contain the options.
ReplyDelete