Too many emails!!!!

[Minuteman Press]

We get approximately 40 emails a day and we are currently using microsoft outlook. Its basically too much for 1 person to handle. We have 3 email addresses. We have 1 person that answers all the orders/questions in the main email address or forwards the appropriate emails to each department (graphics dept. or quotes dept.) but its getting to be too much for 1 person to do from the main email address.

We are thinking about getting another person to answer the main email address from a different computer. Is there a way with microsoft outlook where if one person answers an email on one computer, it will show it was answered on another persons computer in microsoft outlook so we all know what email is or is not answered?

Is there another method I don't know of? How do you guys handle this? I know some big shops have an email address for many of their individual employees but I want to stay away from doing that. Thanks for the help

 

[zoran]

What kind of e-mails are you getting?
I am supervisor in Prepress department and my day is slow if I get double digit e-mails in the day, mostly it's in hundreds e-mails a day.
Now, all those e-mails might not necessarily be for me as I am subscribed to different mailing groups but they might be relevant to certain job and I can get to them easily.
You can filter e-mails by setting up rules.
In your case you can respond to all (including other departments) so they know you answered, but this will generate even more traffic.
I don't think there is out of box solution for your issue.

 

[Cory Smith]

imap will keep mailboxes sync'd across multiple computers.

 

[jotterpinky]

Cory is right...setup Outlook to use IMAP rather than POP3. All emails will be saved on the server and updated in real time across your different instances of Outlook (on multiple systems).

Of course your email server (email provider) will have to be providing IMAP services but I think at this point in time it's pretty much standard.

 

[Minuteman Press]

Thank you for the advice!

Zoran.. some of our emails are answered instantly and others are time consuming. We get many people sending us artwork then asking us to call them when we get the file to go over it on the phone (we try to get them to make changes on paper and then fax it over so we don't have to deal with stuff like that but some customers won't change). Other times its simply, can we have this job printed tomorrow (and the job isn't setup right and we have to explain this to them over the phone. Then of course we have to check if we have the paper in the back, what other jobs are a must for that day, if someone is going to be their at night to run the job, etc. etc.

You know what we also get a ton of emails on and I never really understood it (maybe its just my location)... people send us a PDF file, then ask us to send them a pdf proof back to them. 95% of the time, we just reply the email with the attachment right back to the customer (unless its a big job, then we'll give them a hard copy).