[ale] One email address, multiple users

[Michael H. Warfield]

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
-- 
Michael H. Warfield (AI4NB) | (770) 985-6132 |  mhw at WittsEnd.com
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