Folders vs. Tags For Shared Email Accounts?

binarybum writes "I run a student organization with a 10-member 'board of directors.' We hardly ever all have time to attend meetings and a large part of how we interact with the student body is through email. We have a shared email account (accessible by the 10 of us on the board) right now that is typically accessed through an outlook web-access portal. We've been attempting to keep things organized in the account through a complex collection of folders that have been tacked on ad libum. It's turned into a complete mess. I have the onerous task of restructuring the folder system in hopes of achieving sustainable organization, but I'm wondering if I should just switch us over to a tagging system — perhaps Gmail. Has anyone used tags for a multi-user account successfully or does it end up being just as messy?"

Go with tags

Emails and files tend not to fall into neat hierarchical structures. If you have a large number of possibly intersecting groups, you're going to need a large number of subfolders, and tags are much better.

Re:Go with tags

Use both. Problem solved.
 

Re:Go with tags

It would make more sense to create a mailing list, and have emails sent to the list forwarded to all ten members. Then they could administer their folders as they see fit.

With 10 people on one email account, it's hardly surprising that it turned into a clusterfuck.

Re:

Hear, hear!

Corporate emails at my work consist of endless top-posting after re-top-posting that must be read from the bottom to the top to make any sense of the mess.

I hate top posting. the only thing worse than top posting, is when there's one person insisting on using the opposite posting style in reply to an email with many replies already in one style. (ie. top posting in reply to a bottom posted email thread/bottom posting in reply to a top-posted email thread) Then you cant just read bottom to top (or top to bottom), instead you need to jump all over the friggin' place to follow the conversation.

Re:Go with tags

I tend to agree: using tags, you're not limited to disjoint sets.
Intersections are quite common in real life, and designing the perfect category tree is not easy nor fast. Even when you succeed, you're always running the risk of being confronted with a new item that doesn't fit in your tree, or would need a complete tree redesign to fit in well (see biology).

However, tag systems usually are "all-flat" (Gmail is anyway): there is no notion of sub-category.
If you're going to have dozens of tags, this is going to be messy too...

Re:Go with tags

Tagging still requires everybody to have a consistent ontology (i.e. to want to use the same set of labels, and to interpret them consistently) which in practice they won't. I would choose something with a good search facility instead. Throw it all in a huge pile and just search it later.

(Actually I agree with other posters who say this is just a normal application for an email list, let people do whatever they want, but the OP ruled that out?)

Re:

Throw it all in a huge pile and just search it later.

Based on having done it a number of times before, I disagree. Free-text search gives poor result relevancy compared to search that's aware of metadata. So use tags, AND also invest in a decent search to

Re:Go with tags

I agree with you in theory,but trying to get ten people who rarely meet to agree to the meaning of the different tags AND get them all to apply it consistently would in all likelihood be a royal PITA.

My suggestion(which is what worked for me collaborating on my capstone project) is that each person gets a single folder with their name on it.And then tags will be used in the central workspace for any projects and also each individual is allowed to tag the emails in his/her own folder as they wish. This gives everyone their own workspace and allows them to organize that workspace how they like,while at the same time giving all a central workspace for ongoing collaborative projects. This also cuts down on arguing about layout as everyone gets their own little niche to set up as they please and you only have to get them to agree to a few common tags for the common workspace. Our common tags were IIRC "things we would like to have" ,"things we HAVE to have","status reports",and "need help".

Anyway our system really helped us to get a handle on things while allowing each individual to organize his personal area to what suited him best. Oh,and when you have meetings a similar approach works well in real life. We had our area set up in a Round Robin configuration which allowed those of us with laptops to easily share them with the two that didn't while zinging ideas off each other and at the same time giving us a central area where one of us could go and stand when he wanted to present an idea to the group while having their undivided attention. But I guess it would all depend on your group dynamics so YMMV.

why sare?

Why don't you just send a copy of every email sent to that address to each of the 10 members individuals addresses, and let each of them sort it anyway they want.

Re:why sare?

Why don't you just send a copy of every email sent to that address to each of the 10 members individuals addresses, and let each of them sort it anyway they want.

That only works well under the presumption that everyone's able/bothered to work out their own filtering system... and that's one heck of a presumption :)

If you're going to use tags, since you're a small group you're pretty much going to have to limit yourself to a set predefined ones.. and then the only difference between tags and folders is that a document can only have one folder, but several tags. If you're only 10 people I doubt you really need that finegrained a control, so folders should work just as well as tags.

That said, what this essentially boils down to is the general answer to next to every bloody architectural question out there is; it doesn't matter what you do, as long as you do it well. Seriously, what solution you choose is next to never important, it's how well you use that solution that matters.

Re:

I agree that use of the system is paramount, but to put a finer point on it, all users should agree what tags should be used. For example: If you have a '2008race' tag and an 'Election2008' tag it gets messy quickly.

Should such email data be tagged 'polit

Lazy versus incompetent

That only works well under the presumption that everyone's able/bothered to work out their own filtering system...

I don't buy the "able" argument personally. That's just laziness to my mind. Which leaves "bothered" in your terminology. If someone can't be bothered to organize their own account I find it highly unlikely they will be bothered in a joint account.

Personally I think joint accounts are normally a terrible idea. They are extremely difficult to maintain since (supposedly) everyone is responsible. In my experience if everyone is supposed to be responsible then in reality no one is actually responsible. Tragedy of the commons [wikipedia.org] applies here. Everyone trusts someone else will deal with it and it becomes a big old mess.

Forward to individual accounts

The only way it's going to work well is if no one uses the group account directly, but rather all of the email it receives is forwarded to the individual accounts of the members. Then each member can organize the mail however he or she sees fit.

Use a group

This sounds like an ideal application for a Google or Yahoo groups account. You would have a private group for the board. All of the e-mail would be available in a central location, with individual messages accessible by search, and each board member could forward each mail to their own personal account or not, as they see fit.

Tags

Go with tags, they are more powerful. Folders will force you into a hierarchy (if you can even have sub-folders).

With tags you can create arbitrary categories. So a "status" tag can be assigned to an email that already has a "report" tag but also to the one that has a "meetings" tag. In other words it is like being able to put the same object in two different folders.

One drawback of tags is, that it is harder to visualize. Google does a good job with searching but I can't think how you can visualize it (as a graph/hypergraph actually might work).

The other drawback is that people are more used to folder because they dealt with file systems before ("I'll make a folder for dates, then inside we'll split them by topic" kind of thinking).

Suggestion

Use a message board.

Google Apps (but how?)

I like the idea of a Google Apps account and just sending everything to everyone's account. So how does one do such a thing centrally so that users don't have to think about it? My ideal solution would be to have users send mail to [e-mail]

Re:

Look into google groups. Each user can decide what to do with new messages, including forwarding messages to their own accounts.

Tags: Good; Another Idea?

Emails don't really fit into the folder structure very well because they might belong to several groupings at the same time, thus requiring multiple copies or shortcuts/links to an original (which most email programs don't do). Tags are definitely better for this since an email can have many tags at once.

Here's another idea you might, or might not, like:

Use GMail, or similar, for a group of accounts, one of which is the main, public address. This main account auto-forwards to the 10 member accounts, much like a list-serve. Replies from a member are CC'ed to the main account (set the rules right, or you could end up with an endless loop!!) and the 'Reply To:' field from the members is to the main account. This way, everybody gets everything, the group account is still the focal point, and everybody is responsible for keeping their own account organized.

If a single person is responsible for all of this (you?), you can set it up such that you are the one who can make changes to all the accounts and the others only have emailing privileges (but I haven't thought this part out and it may be difficult with some systems). One thing to consider if you use this is to either have an agreement (which some will break) or a setup that does not allow the users to use this account setup with out the CC'ing. This prevents them from using the account for personal or nefarious reasons.

Re:

No, I have been using Lotus Notes, which has allowed you to put the same email in multiple folders for well over a decade. Anything less is truly a crappy design. I am just shocked that every other email application out there is still decades behind in s

Re:

Most modern email clients let you achieve this functionality with "smart folders" or "saved searches" or whatever nomenclature the particular client uses. These are basically dynamic search results in the guise of a folder. So you might have one smart fo

Let's ask the stupid questions first...

... because the are always the most valuable.

Currently, I'm completely unclear as to what kind of information you are attempting to organize here.

You imply you communicate with each other via e-mail, you say you communicate with the student body via e-mail. Fine, so what exactly is the purpose of these myriad nested folders? What is the organizational problem you are trying to solve?

You have a broken culture

There is absolutely no reason to share emails in this organization.

The secretary's job is not just the completion of the minutes. But to organize and forward on information that is required for the board. Information that is supposed to represent the boards point of view should go through the same single point.

Ad hoc access to, filtering of, replying to and otherwise manipulating the email is broken. One of the symptoms of that brokenness is the problem you are seeing now.

Fix the culture, the rest will follow.

ad libum?

"tacked on ad libum."

This phrase bears to Latin the same relation that "el trucko" bears to Spanish.

I used to think that way..

Until I thought about the ability to have multiple tags on an item. Essentially, with tagging you have the full power of set arithmetic. A hierarchical scheme can be considered a strict subset. If you have INBOX, with a subfolder called 'Bank', and a su