Part of the issue around transparency is that email inbox silos may be the wrong tool for a collaborative and productive tech company.
In general, email is now being seen (as often remarked by ShowHN MVPs) as To Do lists, and in a tech shop, multiple people have an interest in that process. This results in unenforceable policies about To: vs Cc: and unwieldy threads you're never sure if you should delete the tail nested indent history from. As the ShowHN projects assert, email's a poor To Do list tracker.
To refine that slightly, emails tend to be requests.
You don't create a new email thread to give yourself a To Do item. You create a new email thread to ask someone for something. The recipient doesn't care about your agenda. You're the interested party asking, and you need to track your requests.
Employees and clients email requesting action from someone: do this for me, let me do this for you, give me a resource, read this, take action on this, file this, and of course, receive a copy of this to cover my ass. Your To Do items (emails) are now in their lists (inboxes), and once there, you've lost control over the prioritization and handling of them. You'll probably lose visibility too, the moment you stop getting CC'd on your own email thread.
So, we quit using email.
Instead, we use Request Tracker, tracking all those requests. Instead of the Inbox, we have the RT dashboard, backed by automation with full extensibility:
We all use it, and clients are trained (by sales, by contract, and by firm account managment and support response) to use tickets for anything as well. If there's no ticket, you didn't really request it. RT makes this easy, because the client can still just use email -- there's no web interface (well, there is, but they don't have to use it) for them to have to learn. They can just email a team (internally, an RT "ticket queue") and be sure the team will sort out who's handling it with an SLA promise.
If someone on a team has a family emergency, it's no issue, as anyone else on the team can take over that person's tickets till they're back, and immediately see the whole history.
All this is public within the company and fully searchable, going back about a decade.
When I said above we quit using email, I lied!
We actually all use email, but what we're emailing are RT tickets. So throughout the day, we can use any email capable device in the world to interact with this shared request handling history. RT automates the history and the cc lists. You can search your own requests using your email client, or hit the web interface to search everything. Through the web interface we enjoy the benefits of the dashboard summary, automatic response SLA monitoring, cross linked issue tracking, and visibility/searchability by everyone.
Note that RT can pick apart email addresses and subject lines, so you can route all your RT queues through a single Gmail account if you want, spam protecting your system and giving you a master archive searchable using Google's search tools as well.
Stripe is essentially slowly reinventing Best Practical's Request Tracker. Might be worth giving RT a try.
You don't create a new email thread to give yourself a To Do item
Maybe I'm just weird, but I do this pretty frequently (fire off quick instructions/reminders with "TODO:" prepended); after all, there's very little besides email that I care enough about to check frequently enough for any action items I assign to myself to matter.
I understand and agree with the idea behind the "Show HN" projects you mention, but as a potential user, at the end of the day all I really care about is that my personal system/workflow works and helps me get stuff done, not how structured or semantically beautiful my data is. The last thing I need is yet another application/service to demand time/attention from my day.
(On a similar note, I've never been able to commit myself to a well-organised file structure with meaningful nested directories, an indexing system, and so forth, when a flat directory holding tens of thousands of files + ls and whatever regexes has Just Worked for me for years, despite not being pretty.)
Maybe I'm just weird, but I do this [send emails as todo items] pretty frequently (fire off quick instructions/reminders with "TODO:" prepended);
It's also something that I do indirectly via Google Now or Samsung Voice - launch it, say "Note to self - Fix a time with Patricia" or "Remind me to book train tickets". It sends an email to me with that content.
I've used Request Tracker, I actually installed it at an all-Microsoft consulting firm ( http://www.pcubed.com/ ) around 2005.
Pcubed loved it, most of their consultants were out in the field and email was the only tool that we could guarantee that they all had access to. yet we could ensure that everyone involved with a client was included in any conversation about the client. Yes most would just filter these into folders so that if need be they could look things up, but what really made the difference was being able to manage meta-data and ticket state around the emails so that we could see that risks were mitigated, issues addressed.
Virtually no-one used the web interface in RT (except admins to configure new client emails and add users), and that was no surprise to us. We wrote a custom backend that would pull the data and dump it into SQL Server and then SharePoint and Reporting Server... for a Microsoft shop these were the tools they wanted, user controlled reporting capabilities and visibility in the place they were most likely to look (SharePoint).
RT is good, but it is a bit long in the tooth... have you seen http://copyin.com/ ?
CopyIn is not an RT clone, but it does provide group based email addresses, with a web front-end, wiki-spaces for those groups, and so on.
It's about a year old, started by a YC alum who is on here ( https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=petenixey ), and currently in a closed beta, but from what I've seen (a demo) it brings a very fresh approach to this whole problem space (email-centric group awareness and collaboration).
I'd say it's worth anyone looking to implement this stuff to ping Pete Nixey and see if they can get on the beta.
And as others are asking for disclaimers, I work for neither RequestTracker nor Copyin, having only implemented the former and seen a demo of the latter. Pete is a London based founder and I've met him quite a few times. I gain in no way from you choosing to use Copyin, but perhaps we all gain by a nicer tool emerging and getting established in this space.
I remember during the late 90's early 2000's RT was used in almost every NOC because it was one of the few options available.
From the screenshots it looks like it hasn't gotten any better since then. Are you sure your positive experiences aren't just from lack of exposure to newer tools?
I wouldn't confuse the interface with the engine. Under the hood, the advances have been significant over the years.
Best Practical isn't a web design shop, but you can certainly spend time making this pretty if that's a good use of your time.
As noted in a sibling comment, we do try new alternatives constantly. Haven't found anything else that comes close for the seamless email integration, ticket volume, and workflow flexibility we need.
Also as noted in sibling comments, much newer companies than us, tech stars you've heard of, have found RT useful quite recently.
I believe I just shared that. Our company's used RT since 2003.
Over the years we have also tried ZenDesk, Tender Support, etc. They have their place. For example, I like Tender Support for adding help to a small end user facing SAS web site.
But RT can provide automatically structured metadata for extraordinary volumes of internal, client facing, and end user facing email.
If you email some company's support address, and get an email with something like "[company #12345] Your original subject" in the reply, and you can simply reply to that without quoting the original and without any "paste your reply between these lines" nonsense, there's a decent chance they're using RT.
In general, email is now being seen (as often remarked by ShowHN MVPs) as To Do lists, and in a tech shop, multiple people have an interest in that process. This results in unenforceable policies about To: vs Cc: and unwieldy threads you're never sure if you should delete the tail nested indent history from. As the ShowHN projects assert, email's a poor To Do list tracker.
To refine that slightly, emails tend to be requests.
You don't create a new email thread to give yourself a To Do item. You create a new email thread to ask someone for something. The recipient doesn't care about your agenda. You're the interested party asking, and you need to track your requests.
Employees and clients email requesting action from someone: do this for me, let me do this for you, give me a resource, read this, take action on this, file this, and of course, receive a copy of this to cover my ass. Your To Do items (emails) are now in their lists (inboxes), and once there, you've lost control over the prioritization and handling of them. You'll probably lose visibility too, the moment you stop getting CC'd on your own email thread.
So, we quit using email.
Instead, we use Request Tracker, tracking all those requests. Instead of the Inbox, we have the RT dashboard, backed by automation with full extensibility:
We all use it, and clients are trained (by sales, by contract, and by firm account managment and support response) to use tickets for anything as well. If there's no ticket, you didn't really request it. RT makes this easy, because the client can still just use email -- there's no web interface (well, there is, but they don't have to use it) for them to have to learn. They can just email a team (internally, an RT "ticket queue") and be sure the team will sort out who's handling it with an SLA promise.If someone on a team has a family emergency, it's no issue, as anyone else on the team can take over that person's tickets till they're back, and immediately see the whole history.
All this is public within the company and fully searchable, going back about a decade.
When I said above we quit using email, I lied!
We actually all use email, but what we're emailing are RT tickets. So throughout the day, we can use any email capable device in the world to interact with this shared request handling history. RT automates the history and the cc lists. You can search your own requests using your email client, or hit the web interface to search everything. Through the web interface we enjoy the benefits of the dashboard summary, automatic response SLA monitoring, cross linked issue tracking, and visibility/searchability by everyone.
Note that RT can pick apart email addresses and subject lines, so you can route all your RT queues through a single Gmail account if you want, spam protecting your system and giving you a master archive searchable using Google's search tools as well.
Stripe is essentially slowly reinventing Best Practical's Request Tracker. Might be worth giving RT a try.