Email Needs a “My Colleague Can Ignore This Message” Button
July 25th, 2008, 5 Comments »
Julie and I work together on most Capulet projects. As a result, we both get CC’d on a lot of email. In 80% of cases, only one of us actually replies and participates in a given email thread. In many of those cases, the discussion is mostly or entirely irrelevant to whoever doesn’t respond. If they need to know about it, the responder can generally be convey the thread’s gist in a very brief conversation.
It isn’t news to anyone that CC gets abused all the time. In truth, though, when Julie and I both receive email, it’s usually not CC abuse. The sender is just unsure which of us will respond. And I think we like it that way, because we don’t necessarily want to surgically divide our duties and responsibilities.
Wouldn’t it be great, though, if my email app included a button that read “Julie can ignore this message”? Having replied to a message (and maybe its followups), it takes much less attention for me to assess whether she needs to read the thread than it does for her to make that appraisal by having to read the whole thing.
Wouldn’t it be great if we assigned a few trusted colleagues this power? They’d just right-click on our names and choose “Ignore this thread” from a drop-down menu. The message would bypass our inbox and get archived wherever we specified.
Maybe this functionality already exists in some email applications? If so, when can we get it in Gmail?