I have a manager who has shared his mail and calendar to his assistant and they are having an issue. The problem is that when the assistant reads his e-mail, the read marks are not updated on his client and this is causing them confusion as to whether an e-mail has been responded to. I have tried to find an answer on this in this forum, and a few years ago the response from others is that these marks were user specific and nothing could be done. Is this still the case today, or is there finally a solution to this problem in version 7?
Thanks in advance
Subject: Read/Unread Marks in Shared Mail File
Unread marks are id specific, and I imagine always will be, so I wouldn’t be waiting around for this to change and solve your user’s confusion.
There are various other methods that could be used to minimise confusion - it might not be as simple as the’d like, but may at least minimise them tripping over each other’s work.
Off the top of my head these are some solutions you could offer them:
If messages are filed when they’re dealt with they won’t sit in the Inbox anymore.
The Replied to flag should be viewable to both parties when a message has been replied to. They can use Reply even when they really want to Forward, but just overwriting the To field after hitting reply.
The simple Follow Up flag agents can be used by the Manager, (and the agent unhidden from the assistant), and used to signal progress has been made.
For some shared mail boxes I have given my users simple agents under the actions menu, so that they can “Mark” messages with “their” picture to show they are deailing with them. eg. @SetField(“_ViewIcon2” ; 163) marks the email with a picture of a spy.
Hope one of these will be acceptable as a workaround for your people.
Cheers
Kirsty
Subject: Read/Unread Marks in Shared Mail File
It’s not a problem, as such – it’s working as designed. For instance, I read this forum using the Notes client and don’t particularly care whether or not someone else has read a given document, since it has no bearing on whether or not the problem or solution described is of interest to me. I may miss a lot if documents were marked as read whenever any user touched them (particularly as the original poster is one of those users).
That being said, the mere fact that a document has been read by someone is a less than useful indication of the document’s status. An assistant may read an email, realize that it requires action that requires more authority than the assistant actually possesses and mean to do somethng about it. Relying on unread marks alone, the fact that the document has been read makes it look for all the world like the item has already been actioned. Much more useful would be some indication that the document has been actioned in some way – that it has been replied to, filed, or marked for follow-up. All of these actions are available to end-users in the standard mail template.