Nineteen of Our Shared Mailboxes Were Being Read by Nobody

#sergueyshinder #itoperations #email #servicedesk

In April a customer complained to our managing director that he had been writing to us about a damaged pallet for seven weeks without a reply. He had been writing to the returns address printed on our delivery notes. That mailbox belonged to a team merged into customer services in 2023, and the rule forwarding its mail had been lost during our mail migration the following year. Nobody noticed, because nobody was expecting anything.

So we counted. We have two hundred and twelve shared mailboxes. Sixty four had not been opened by anyone in ninety days, and nineteen of those were still receiving mail from outside the company every week. Between them they held about fourteen hundred unread messages: carrier claims, a customer cancelling a standing order, a council enquiry about a planning condition at one of our depots, and several dozen chasers from people who had given up waiting for an answer to the first message.

Creating a shared mailbox is a two minute request to the service desk, and we have always treated it as a convenience for the team that asks for it. The form asks for a name and a list of people who need access. It does not ask who is responsible for answering, and it does not ask where the address is going to be published. Addresses end up on invoices, packaging, websites and supplier portals, and they outlive the teams that asked for them by years. We can delete a mailbox. We cannot recall every delivery note that carries its address.

Every shared mailbox now has an owning team and a named manager, and the request form will not complete without both. Owners confirm their mailboxes twice a year. When a team is merged or dissolved its mailboxes are part of the change, with a decision recorded for each one. A mailbox without an owner is not deleted but answers every message with the address that replaced it. And externally facing mailboxes are monitored for the age of their oldest unread message, so anything untouched for five working days raises a ticket with the owner.

The unread count across those nineteen is now close to nothing, and the customer with the pallet was eventually refunded.

To the team that asked for it, a shared mailbox was a folder. To everybody writing to it, it was a promise that somebody here was listening.

– Serguey Shinder