in reply to Filing Emails

Oh, gosh, where to start? Requiring custom mail headers is probably a non-starter. There are too many mail clients with too much variety in their featuresets to presume that this will be easy for the mail senders to do. The obvious remaining possibilities are:

1) Set up a series of different mailing addresses for different purposes. Mail is categorized depending on the address it's sent to.

2) Look for keywords in the subject header.

3) Look for a block of text in the message body which contains the information you need.

My inclination would be to do as much as possible with #1 and #2, and only resort to special text in the message body as a last resort.

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Re: Re: Filing Emails
by Gremlin (Acolyte) on Sep 27, 2001 at 08:28 UTC
    Ok lets say i use suggestion #3

    how can i force the user (who is using whatever email application) to put in these headers?

[reply]
      You can't. You have to show them how it would be useful for them to do so. Each user group is going to have a different "Spoonful of Sugar" to keep them coming back for more (or in this case, doing what you need them to do). Whether it's a folder of documents searchable by what manufacturer they discuss, or an application that sorts news clippings from the various wire services by date, author, publication, etc. You need to give them a reason to do something, and the reason has to have some kind of value to their process.

      One of the ways I used to create this value was to include the various user groups in the creation of their folder taxonomy, and asked them to brainstorm ideas about useful meta data, etc. This gave them a kind of "Pride of Ownership". This also motivated them to use the structures that they put in place, rather than fight against change that came from without.

      This topic is a painful paradigm shift for any company that has an ingrained way of doing anything.

      It takes time and patience, and someone to back you up that is higher on the food chain than the groups you are asking to change....

      C-.

[reply]

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