Shared Inboxes for Teaching and Committees

A shared inbox was a tool I started using when I was the hybrid chair of the SIGCSE Technical Symposium. It was extremely useful then, and I have since incorporated it into my teaching processes. So, this blog post covers why I use a shared inbox, considerations when using one, and two case studies of how those considerations played out.

[Also posted on medium.]

Why use a shared inbox?

In short, efficiency! If more than one person in a group can respond to an email, the speed of response goes up while no one repeats work. I’ve lost count of how often I’ve seen multiple people get an email and respond simultaneously. Or I’ve been that person who started writing and thankfully didn’t send it before the other person hit send!

But there are more efficiency gains than just that! There’s clarity on the context, on who is responsible, and in the email responses themselves. If the entire email thread is in the shared inbox, everyone has access to that context, and no one has to find and forward an email because someone got dropped from the email thread. In addition, shared inboxes usually allow users to assign threads to someone, which means it’s clear who is handling something. Finally, since the responder has all the context, they can reply more consistently and solidly.

Things to consider

From my experience of using a shared inbox for course teaching staff and a conference organizing committee, here are the considerations I noticed:

What platform to use: There are many different platforms out there. These platforms often are more framed as customer service solutions, like Zendesk. There are also open-source, lightweight platforms like FreeScout. Some platforms also let you respond to emails from her personal email address, but it appears like you are emailing from the shared inbox. This might be an important factor when deciding how to handle these emails.

Who has access: This depends on who can respond to emails, be responsible for them, and should have access to the content in those emails. There are also privacy considerations since, with teaching staff, it may include FERPA-protected student data.

Email notification policy: This may seem odd to include, but the shared inbox is now another inbox you need to manage! How do you want to do it? Would you rather have (1) all the emails in the shared inbox also appear in your personal one? (2) Have no email overlap unless both email addresses were directly sent the email? (3) Or some middle ground you are willing to configure into the shared inbox?

Emailing policy: This is similar to email notifications but focuses on what email address you email from and how strict you are in enforcing which address (the shared one or yours) others send emails to. So, for example, you could require everyone email the shared inbox to the level of responding to emails sent to your personal email address with only “It looks like you are asking about X. Please email Y instead. I do not respond to emails about X from my personal email so that the entire committee/staff/group is on the same page.” Alternatively, you could send from your own email and always CC the shared inbox. This latter strategy risks the shared or your email falling off the email thread, but sometimes emails are better coming from your personal email address.

Default settings: There are lots of default settings. The one that I’ve most recently had to consider is how much of the thread content should be included when responding from the shared inbox. Typically, a personal inbox quotes the entire thread. However, shared inbox defaults could quote nothing, the last email, etc. In FreeScout, the default can be overridden per response, but a good default can be really useful. It depends on how you use the shared inbox (if there’s a bunch of internal discussion first, make sure that doesn’t get leaked). If you end up CCing people to pull them into a situation, quoting the entire thread might be better.

Case Study: Teaching Staff

I use a shared inbox with a subset of my teaching staff because I want that subset to be on the same page, and often, multiple of us can respond to the same email. Moreover, a lot of communication happens over email, even though I also try to move as much of it as possible to the class forum. Placing the entire burden of handling the email on me is not a good idea for my workload or the bottleneck I would become.

Who has access: Those with access to the shared inbox are myself, the graduate TAs (GTAs), and the teaching associate (see my blog post on The Teaching Staff Roles For My 200+ Student Class for who this is). At Duke, there are some restrictions on what information undergrad TAs (UTAs) can have. Moreover, sometimes, students share sensitive information in emails, so to be safer, UTAs are not allowed. Moreover, I tell students that UTAs do not have access in hopes that they feel safer sharing anything and everything.

Email notification policy: The shared inbox emails everything to my personal inbox. This helps me keep tabs on what is happening, and the number of students (N=80–250) isn’t big enough to make my inbox unmanageable. I think I’d change the settings if the number of students got much bigger than 300 though.

Emailing policy: My GTAs always send and respond from the shared inbox. I often CC it because I’ve noticed students sometimes react differently if the email comes from my address versus the class’s email address. We do our best to signal to the students what is email worthy versus the class forum. Moreover, we enforce this by responding to any questions that belong on the class forum with something like “This should be asked on the class forum. Please post it there, and we’ll respond there so everyone can benefit.”

Default settings: All emails quote the last message. I use this setting mainly because the most common reason to add someone to the CC of an email is when I’m pulling in a student’s academic dean. The main reason I need to do this is that the student just shared something that will affect all of their courses, which is outside my purview. The dean then needs to know the context of the student’s latest email.

Case Study: Conference Organizing Committee

The second year I was the Hybrid Chair for the SIGCSE Technical Symposium (TS) in 2024, I convinced the committee to use a shared inbox for the 7 chairs (2 Organizing chairs, 3 Program chairs, and 2 Hybrid chairs) to manage all of the communication. I advocated for it because a lot of communication happened through email since only the direct SIGCSE TS committee was in Slack, and there were so many people we worked with who emailed us. Having a shared inbox that all seven of us had access to meant we could more easily stay on the same page. No one could fall off an email thread if we were all looking in the same email inbox after all. Finally, we were all paired/tripled, so there were almost always multiple people who could respond to the same email. By all of us responding in the same place, we were much less likely to duplicate work by responding separately and could assign threads to each other.

I am so grateful that the other chairs agreed to the shared inbox. We did it by creating a GMail account that was forwarded the emails from the aliases for each chair pair/triple. Here is the general breakdown of how we did it.

Who has access: All 7 chairs and the data/web team had access. The former so we were all on the same page and the latter to set up the shared inbox for us. The data/web team used the shared aliases to create workflows where emails were automatically tagged with which alias were emailed. The shared inbox made it easy to pull in another pair/triple with little re-explaining. All we had to do was message the other chair(s) the link to the email thread, and we could read the entire context ourselves. And often pulling in another chair(s) was warranted because it was things like an author emailing the program chairs about an online presentation that was within the purview of the hybrid chairs.

Email notification policy: I only received the initial email and any status notifications, like when a thread was assigned to me. This let me compartmentalize the conference work to only be when I actually went to the shared inbox. I, of course, was aware of what was happening, but it didn’t flood my inbox like my class can. Of course, I had the advantage that conference organizing the vast majority of the time has nothing that is “respond within a few hours” urgent.

Emailing policy: My personal rule was to always respond from the shared inbox. This, again, helped with compartmentalization. I think it also vastly reduced the risk of a thread losing the shared inbox email address.

Default settings: I honestly don’t remember. I think the replies included the entire thread.

Conclusion

A shared inbox is an excellent tool to consider for multiple situations. My one caution is do not add “yet another tool” to your toolbox if you don’t actually need it. No one wants to add more overhead without sufficient benefit. Hopefully, this blog post and the case studies will help you think through whether this is worth doing.

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