Managing and Storing Emails

Jeckles

Hello all and thanks in advance,
I am trying to setup a method for storing emails for a small business. I work on multiple projects at one time with other employees. I would like to store incoming emails for each project in its own file located in the project folder with other project information. The file needs to be accessible by all employees at any time. A brief scenario might make it easier to understand what I am trying to accomplish.
I (or any other team member) receive an email. After I read it and deem it important to retain, I move it to the "email storage file" for that project which is located in the project folder on another server. I would then like anyone on the team to be able open, read, reply etc. this email as if it where in their INBOX. Is this possible? I currently create a .pst email file for each project and store it in the project folder. This works great if only one employee is working on a project. Once multiple people start working on the project, we end up storing a bunch of duplicate emails due to forwarding emails to each other. Also a forwarded email is harder to find because it can't really be sorted. The only solution I can come up with is to setup a .pst file for each employee working on the project. It would be nice to have one file that all employee could access and dump emails into. When the project is over I could close the file and know all of the email correspondence is stored in the project file and later if I need to look through emails for a project, all I have to do open that one file and be able to sort through it easily. Sorry for being long winded.

J

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popowich

Hi Jeckles,

Interesting question! What kind of mail servers and other resources do you have available? The first solution that comes to mind is using shared imap folders to store the project emails. You can create a shared imap folder for each project. The implementation instructions are quite different between Microsoft and Linux servers, and depending on the MTA they are running too for example Microsoft Exchange vs. qmail. In exchange this would be more of a role account that everyone can add to their account settings vs. an imap folder hosted on a unix mail server. I have also set up processes that read read e-mail files directly over samba (SMB) shares, but that's not as nice as the imap folders.

-Raymond

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Jeckles

Raymond,

Thank you for your response. I see I am a little over my head already. I am going to get with our IT guy (he doesn't know of better way either) and have him help me respond to your questions. All I know is we use MS Outlook and we store all of our project files (autocadd drawings, model files, etc.) in a project folder on a server. Our emails eventually just get deleted.

I will respond again tomorrow with more information.

Thanks,
Jeff

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yukon

in a former life I was an Exchange admin amongst various other things.

I setup (many times over) exactly what you are asking for. With exchange you can setup public folders where various users can have different levels of permissions. What you are describing can easily be accomplished via MS Exchange public folders. You can even assign email addresses to them so incoming emails go directly there and don't have to be managed by users individually.

Required components:
Exchange, MS Active Directory, and the outlooks you already, or you could probably get away with only utilizing OWA (Outlook web access).

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Jeckles

Thanks for the information

We tried using public folders and it seemed to be the ideal solution. However, when I tried to move the emails into the public folder, some of the emails couldn't be move. I kept getting an error message stating I didn't have permission to move the emails. The emails I couldn't move were all from the same sender. I had all the appropriate permissions (as far as know) and we (me and the IT guy) couldn't figure out what the problem was. We ended up scraping the idea. I thought it must be some setting the sender uses when sending emails. I wouldn't be able to automatically route the emails because some senders are involved in multiple projects.

Thanks again,

Jeff

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yukon

Jeckles:

first have your IT person double check permissions and settings, it may even be something odd with a setting in your local outlook. Also whenever troubleshooting permissions, I find it easiest to make the user (yourID) temporarily administrator over a resource and back down the permissions from there until you achieve the desired effect.

next, on public folders -> you can assign an email address to them. For example, my old company used to have it organized by client:

-> folder clienta
-> folder clientb
-> folder clientc

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