PD said:
Thanks VanguardLH,
I have a group of 12 people who all receive the same email at the same time.
One of the twelve (first come first serve) will take ownership of the email.
I am trying to figure a way for the other 11 to know it is being handled.
My thought was whoever opened the email first owned it and an automatic
message would go out to the rest of the crew indicating someone had opened it.
Hmm, I wonder if a shared IMAP account wouldn't do what you want. You
would use a rule to move all e-mails from the Inbox that you wanted to
handle under this shared scenario. You would use a view in that folder
that would hide messages that were read. When the first person reads a
message in that folder, and if IMAP used by the e-mail client then
updates the mailbox up on the server, it would be marked as read up on
the server. That all depends if using IMAP has the status of local
items get updated in the mailbox and if that status gets reflected to
the shared users of the same IMAP mailbox. I don't use IMAP so I'm not
that familiar with how it synchronizes up on the server in the mailbox
regarding read/unread status and if that also get reflected to anyone
else sharing that same IMAP mailbox. It would be something you could
test.
If you are using Exchange with shared (public) folders, maybe just using
a view that hides read messages would work. Each person that visits the
folder only works on unread items. Problem is that once read then that
same user who is working on that e-mail won't be able to see it later.
Seems like they would have to open (read) the e-mail but then save a
copy of it into their own "work" folder before closing that message. If
they forgot to save their working copy, they would have to change to a
view that showed the now read message, grab a copy, and then switch back
to the "show unread messages" view.
Of course, an even easier way without having to use views or IMAP would
be to simply attach a flag to a message. Whomever chose to work on an
e-mail would add a flag to it. Others would see the flag and know that
someone else was already working on it. You could even use categories
and color the messages by category to identify if an e-mail was assigned
(and to whom by color or category) or just add the Categories column to
see to whom an e-mail was assigned.