Published on December 4, 2024 10:00 PM GMT
In my current work, and at various previous companies, I've done a lotof coordination with external groups. We generally use email forthis: it's very standard and works well enough.
One place where it doesn't work very well, though, is making itpossible for others working on a project to read and find relevantthreads. For example, if I write to our partner I can CC coworkerswho are currently on the project, but what if my boss is interested?What about other people who might join the project later? What if Iwant to share a link to the conversation with a co-worker?
My preferred solution here is email lists. For example, if I were atExampleCorp working on Project Cabbage with OtherCorp, I would createa cabbage-other@example.com list and CC it on all my Cabbage-relatedmessages to OtherCorp. If the Cabbage-Other collaboration isn'tsensitive I might have the list set so anyone at ExampleCorp can join,or I might open it only to specific people at ExampleCorp. (This isoverkill if Cabbage is a small project; then I'd just usecabbage-collaborations@ or some other single address for everythingexternal Cabbage-related.)
This also makes CCing someone a much clearer signal: without this,it's hard to tell the difference between being CC'd on a message "soyou can read it if you want to" vs "because you probably should befollowing this thread." But if I receive a message because I'm on thecabbage-other@ list that's not something I necessarily need to read,while if I'm explicitly listed in the CC line I'll pay more attention.
I can also tell my mail client about this: I'll subscribe to all ofthese lists but set them to skip my inbox if I'm not specificallymentioned. [1] Then they show up in my Gmail search, and if I dolater want to reply to one (ex: we're moving work around; someone'sout) it's easy.
[1] In Gmail: on a message from the list click "filter messages likethis", verify it has a "has the words" of something likelist:(...)
, expand that to append -to:me-cc:me
, click "create filter, check "skip the inbox".
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