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by wlesieutre 4181 days ago
Easier said than done. I routinely pull up emails from a year and a half ago for reference, and it'd be a giant pain if I had to request access to some sort of secure archive for them.

Maybe it's necessary to move in that direction (and maybe emails stick around only if you've specifically flagged them?), but you're going to have to drag people kicking and screaming into that kind of system. Gmail search has spoiled us.
3 comments
thirdtruck 4181 days ago
My proposition: Anything worth referencing later is worth filing properly.

That may mean transcribing instructions into a stand-alone checklist, writing up formal user stories, or the like. However, those acts also clear away a lot of cruft that can otherwise make it nigh-impossible to find the needed info. I've run many a Gmail search, only to find that a valuable email was buried under innumerable "Not quite what I wanted" ones.

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boracay 4181 days ago
For a lot of internal data it's having and using the appropriate systems in the first place. It's like VCS. You don't e-mail someone code anymore. You make a branch or whatever and then reference that in your communication.
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boracay 4181 days ago
You do need a good alternative systems of course. But once those old e-mails isn't around anymore you would have to use the other system to still have access to the data.

I'm not even sure current e-mail systems are such a good tool. I would think chat for internal things and some CRM type system (leveraging e-mail) would be better. But yes as you said, easier said than done.

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jodrellblank 4181 days ago
What you describe is not "easier said than done" - automated email archiving is easily done.

What you describe is "I want less company security, more personal convenience". (As almost everyone wants, almost all the time).

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wlesieutre 4181 days ago
It's not easier said than done because it's technically difficult, it's easier said than done because you have to shove it down users throats and they're not going to be happy about it. And because there's an associated cost to productivity.

Worth it to avoid something like Sony's indecent? Probably. Easy to convince the non-technical decisionmakers of that? I'd bet not.

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