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My team uses email for providing support to users. All support emails are CC'ed to the support team mailing list. But sometimes it can still happen that two people in the team are replying to the same email at the same time, and clicking on Send at the same time. The user then ends up receiving two replies.

The easiest way to solve this would be to send a reply with only the support team as recipient, telling the team that I'm typing a reply right now, but this is too troublesome. Does there exist some tool with which I can see which other people in my team are currently replying to the same email?

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If two people are using the same account, then assigning the task to a single person, solves this problem. – Ramhound Nov 2 '12 at 13:56
We are not using the same account. – Hongli Nov 2 '12 at 15:50

migrated from superuser.com Nov 2 '12 at 15:45

2 Answers

up vote 0 down vote

Create a contact group of all relevant team members and Bc that group by default when replying to an email that they've all received. That's what my team does anyway and seems to work pretty well.

Other than that there's nothing by default in Gmail or in Google Labs that will tell you when another person has replied to an email that you've received unless you both use the same account in which case it will automatically update the conversation view to reflect the newest reply.

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They are already CC'ed. The problem is both people typing and clicking on Send at the same time. I don't need a default Gmail/Google Labs product. Are there any third party ones? – Hongli Nov 2 '12 at 15:51
It sounds to me like you're trying to use an email product (gmail) for a workflow task. You really need a tool/process that lets queries be assigned to people. One gmail work-around would be that the person who starts working on a received message assigns a label when they START their reply, and everyone checks the original message for this just before pressing SEND – MaryC.fromNZ Nov 3 '12 at 0:02
That is what I meant. I want notification when someone STARTS replying, not when someone has replied. But I want all this to happen seamlessly and without hassle. How do you make labels that are visible across multiple Gmail accounts? How do you automatically apply a label upon viewing a message? – Hongli Nov 4 '12 at 12:56
up vote 0 down vote

One thing you could try is the collaborative inbox feature in Google Groups - http://www.googlegooru.com/how-to-setup-a-collaborative-inbox-in-google-groups

A true workflow application or support system (like Zendesk) would of course be better, but if you don't have the budget for it, then collaborative inbox may suit your needs well enough.

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