Your first week

ShareMail is small on purpose, and you do not need all of it on day one. This is the order that tends to stick.

Day one: assign everything

The single habit that removes most of the pain is one owner per conversation. Before anyone replies, the question “who has this?” should have an answer on the screen rather than in Slack.

Click Assign in the reader header, pick a person, done. The unassigned queue is the shared to-do list; it should trend towards empty. See Assignments.

Day two: stop forwarding

When you want a colleague’s opinion on an email, do not forward it. Leave an internal comment and @ them. They get notified, they see the customer’s message and your note in one place, and the customer sees none of it.

The test: if your team has stopped pasting customer emails into chat, this has landed.

Day three: close things

e archives. A conversation you have finished with should leave the queue, because a queue that never empties stops meaning anything. Send & archive (⌘↵) does both at once and moves you to the next conversation, which is how most replies should end.

Snooze, the alarm icon in the reader header, is for things you genuinely cannot act on yet: the conversation disappears and comes back at the time you choose. See Triage.

Later: rules, once you see the pattern

Do not write rules on day one. Work the inbox for a week, notice what you do by reflex to the same kind of mail every time, and automate only that. Rules written before you know the shape of your mail are rules you will spend a month untangling.

Templates are the same story. Once you have typed the same answer three times, save it as a template with the customer’s name filled in for you.

The one thing not to do

Do not use tags as a status. You already have status: open, snoozed, archived, plus assignment. A tag that means “waiting on customer” will drift out of sync with reality the first busy afternoon, because nothing forces it to be true. Tags are for subject matter, which does not change. See Tags.