[ale] One email address, multiple users

Jim Kinney jim.kinney at gmail.com
Thu Nov 19 10:54:56 EST 2009


But putting in the least populated inbox could "punish" the person who
processes the most orders and thus has moved the emails to a "done"
folder.

I still think from the perspective of this particular need an email
based ticketing system will be the best operational process.

I had a client who used Interchange for an online ordering system.
When an order was made an email was generated with that order data,
gpg signed and encrypted and emailed to a particular account. From
that point it was possible to use procmail to cc to other accounts.
But the final order processing was done back in Interchange to track
the shipping of the order and that required an employee login which
was attached to the order process itself. The charge card process was
handled manually, offline but the data was sent in that

By gluing in the ticketing process, it adds a layer of tracking and
accountability and everyone can check on things for status.

In all reality, migrating from a single order fulfillment person to
multiple people appears to be more than the current process can
support. It may be worth the time and expense to begin looking at
transitioning to a more capable online ordering system.

On Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 1:17 AM, Richard Bronosky <Richard at bronosky.com> wrote:
> Jim, round robin would require a file that logs the last mailbox used. What
> might be easier and more effective would be for each incoming email to go to
> the box with the fewest entries. I would do it with bash within my procmail
> recipe.
>
> On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 6:39 PM, Jim Kinney <jim.kinney at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> I was mulling about this approach but I could wrap my head around how
>> to do a round robin in procmail.
>>
>> not that I'm any good at all with procmail...
>>
>> If you have any procmail scripts that do something like this please
>> share!!
>>
>> PS. glad to see you posting again on ALE. It's been a long time - welcome
>> back!
>>
>> 2009/11/18 Björn Gustafsson <bg-ale at bjorng.net>:
>> > If you wanted to follow that approach, you could even go so far as to
>> > write a procmail rule that does a round-robin delivery of messages
>> > into three different folders, one per person/workstation.  Then they'd
>> > each log in with the same mail account, but just look at a different
>> > "personal" folder.
>> >
>> > On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 3:54 PM, PairOfTwins
>> > <PairOfTwins at mindspring.com> wrote:
>> >> Mike:
>> >>
>> >> If they don't have much in the budget, this dragging emails to folders
>> >> idea sounds like a quick but effective solution.
>> >>
>> >> I'm unclear on where the outgoing emails would end up.  Could each
>> >> "Inbox" have a corresponding "Sent" folder?
>> >>
>> >> Thanks,
>> >> Tom
>> >> ===========================
>> >> Michael H. Warfield wrote:
>> >>> On Tue, 2009-11-17 at 21:28 -0500, PairOfTwins wrote:
>> >>>
>> >>>> Gang:
>> >>>
>> >>>> A local business takes orders online (about 150 per day, each order a
>> >>>> separate email) and processes them from 1 workstation.  They'd like
>> >>>> to
>> >>>> have 3 workstations processing that same batch of incoming emails.
>> >>>>  The
>> >>>> goal is for each user to see which emails had been responded to, and
>> >>>> process only the ones that hadn't.
>> >>>
>> >>>> My basic approach would be an IMAP setup.  Any better idea?  More
>> >>>> sophisticated solution?
>> >>>
>> >>> Honestly...  IMAP is a great idea, but...  You should make queue's
>> >>> (IMAP
>> >>> folders) for each person.  Each person grabs a message and pulls it
>> >>> into
>> >>> their queue and then they are responsible for it.  Otherwise, it will
>> >>> just become too intractable trying to depend on read and responded to
>> >>> flags.  If they fail to handle it, that's a problem but, at least, you
>> >>> know who claimed it.  The alternative is a dispatcher who routes
>> >>> messages to the queues and assigns them out.  Just doing it in a
>> >>> single
>> >>> IMAP mailbox as a free for all is going to be a mess.
>> >>>
>> >>> Not saying IMAP is the best idea here (but for small operations it
>> >>> very
>> >>> well might be) but if you want to use IMAP, this is how I would do it.
>> >>>
>> >>>
>> >>>> Tom
>> >>>
>> >>> Mike
>> >
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>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> --
>> James P. Kinney III
>> Actively in pursuit of Life, Liberty and Happiness
>>
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>
>
> --
> .!# RichardBronosky #!.
>
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-- 
-- 
James P. Kinney III
Actively in pursuit of Life, Liberty and Happiness



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