A distribution list is an address with no mailbox sat behind it. Mail arrives at the address, gets copied out to everybody on the list, and the address its self keeps nothing, holds nothing, and remembers nothing about what happened next. That is not a fault in it, mind you, it is the whole of the design, and for sending word out to forty people at once it is a fine bit of plumbing altogether. The bother starts the day somebody writes back to one. A reply needs somewhere to live. There is nowhere at all.
Donal found that out on a Tuesday. He minds the computers and half of everything else at an architecture practice outside Sligo, thirty odd people, and their client address had been a distribution list going back further than anybody could remember, five names on it. A client rang him about a drawing revision she had sent in three weeks before and heard nothing about since. So Donal went to search the mail, the way anybody would, and there was nothing to search. No mailbox. Five copies of that message had gone out to five separate inboxes and one of those inboxes belonged to a lad who had left the practice in the spring, and the whole of the record of it was scattered across four laptops and a leaver’s account nobody could open. He found the drawing in the end. Three hours later, in the sent folder of a colleague who happened to be out that day.
The list had worked away grand for years, in fairness to it, and nobody in the whole of it had gone and done a single thing wrong.
How a fine bit of plumbing goes and turns into a hole
Somebody sets the list up in twenty seconds, usually years back, usually to solve a small problem that afternoon, client mail should reach the four of us, so it does, and nobody ever goes back over the whole of it again. And the thing works for a good long while, on account of four people all reading the same message being genuinely better than one person reading it and going off on holidays with it sat in his inbox.
Then the list gets what every list gets. Another name on it. A new hire arrives and it costs nothing at all to add them, so on they go, and somebody moves department and comes off, or does not, or nobody ever remembers to take them off, and the names drift away from the people who actually do the work, quietly, over years, with no one anywhere looking at that.
The real damage sits in the replying, truth be told. A message lands with the five of them and each one sees it and each one thinks, reasonably, that somebody nearer to it will pick it up. So it goes unanswered by all five. Every one of them was being sensible their own self at the time, no two ways about it. Or the opposite happens on a busy morning and two of them answer the same client inside ten minutes with two different dates, and both of them correct as far as either one knew, mind you.
And whoever does reply, replies from their own address. The client answers that, and now the conversation has quietly left the list altogether and is living in one person’s inbox where nobody else can see it, and the next message on the same job goes back to the list where four people who never saw the middle of the story are staring at the end of it. That is how a firm goes and asks a client something she answered a fortnight ago.
Where the copies go wrong, told the way it actually happens
Say a client sends the one message on a Monday and five copies of it go out. The lad in the car reads his on the phone at a set of lights and files it in his own head as handled. Another flags it, means to come back to it after the site meeting, and never does, which is the commonest of the lot of them. There is one deletes it outright, on account of being fairly sure it is somebody else’s. The fourth is away that week with the auto reply switched on, so the client gets word that the firm is away when the firm is not away at all, and that is its own small damage done. And the good soul answers it properly, which is the only reason the drawing got looked at in the first place.
Now there are five states of the one message and nowhere at all that those five states are visible together. The mailbox that would show you the whole of it does not exist. It never did. Three weeks later, when the client rings, the only way back to the truth is Donal going round asking four people what they remember, which is the exact conversation he had that Tuesday.
The three things people mix up, and they are not the same animal
A distribution list forwards and forgets. That is the shape of it, and no version of it stores your mail. On the Microsoft side the three-way runs a little differently, and we set it out as shared mailbox vs distribution list.
Then there is the shared mailbox, the sort your email provider will hand you for nothing, and that is a real mailbox with a real archive that several people can open, and it is a genuine step up on the list, on account of the messages all being in the one place where a new person can go back through them. What it will not carry is state. There is nothing in a plain shared mailbox that says this one is mine and I am on it, and read is not the same thing as handled, so five people looking at the same folder still get the two problems the list had, the silence and the double answer, only now they get them politely and in one place. Google’s own step up from the plain list sits about here as well, and we went through the setup of a Google Collaborative Inbox and the five places it stops in a piece of its own.
The rung above that again is a proper shared inbox built for support work, which is the mailbox plus the missing bit. The address stays exactly as it was, the client notices nothing, but each message becomes a ticket with an owner and a state on it, so a thing that is open looks different to a thing that is done, and the person who has it is a matter of record rather than a matter of hoping.
That is the whole ladder, and most firms are on the bottom rung of it without ever having chosen to be.
Why adding more people to the list makes it worse
The reflex, the moment mail starts falling through, is to put another name on the list, since two of them are missing things and a third pair of eyes must surely help with that. It does the opposite, and there is a good long while of research behind the why of it, going back to the bystander work in social psychology in the sixties, which found that the more people who can see a thing, the less any one of them feels it is theirs to be doing.
Four names on a client address is not four times the cover. It is four people each carrying a quarter of a sense of responsibility, and a quarter of a sense of responsibility does not get a client answered on a Thursday afternoon when the site is roaring and the phone is going. One name on it, with the mail visible to the rest, beats four names on it every single time. That is not about the people. Donal has good people. It is about the list having no way in the world to say whose job this one is, and never having had one.
Where a distribution list is still the right answer
Fair is fair, so let me not go slandering the thing altogether. For one-way word going out, a distribution list is exactly correct and nothing needs replacing. All-staff notices, a fire drill on Thursday, the office closing at four on Christmas Eve, a notice to every subcontractor on a job. Nobody is expected to reply to those. So nothing needs holding, and paying out for anything cleverer than a list would be daft.
The rule of thumb sits there, near enough. If a reply is expected at that address, the list is the wrong tool for it. Where nothing is expected back, leave the list where it is and think no more about it. Donal kept two of his own and only went and moved the one that clients wrote into.
Where a tool like Maxdesk fits, said without the sales voice
I would as soon say straight out that this is the sort of firm we built Maxdesk for than have the piece pretend it strolled onto the subject by chance. Proper help desk software is not a big thing to put on a small firm any more, and the whole of what it does here is put a mailbox back underneath the address that never had one.
The client keeps writing to the very same address she always wrote to, and knows nothing about any of it. Behind that, each message lands once instead of five times, and it carries an owner and a state, so the silence and the double answer both go away for the same reason. Everybody sees the history, including the parts that happened while they were on a roof somewhere. Replies go out from the practice rather than from whoever’s laptop was open, so no conversation goes wandering off into a private inbox. And when a person leaves, their work stays where the firm can see it, which is the thing that cost Donal his Tuesday. It ships a knowledge base for the questions that come round every job, the drawing formats and the revision numbering and where to send an invoice, and you can set the reply times you mean to hold your own self to and let it mind the clock on them.
It runs on a free plan with nothing charged per head, which matters for a practice where the number of people on client mail changes with the work. Fair is fair a second time, there is a trade in the free plan and you may as well hear it from me now. The free workspace carries some supporting ads, puts a small Maxdesk name at the foot of the mail going out, and keeps three months of history rather than the whole of forever, and the longer archive is what the paid plans are for.
The part this does not fix its self
Maxdesk is email support and that is deliberately the whole of it. There is no phone line behind it, nor a chat bubble in the corner of your website, nor a portal bolted on the side, so if the bulk of your client work happens by voice then a tool built around email is not going to be your answer and I would be doing you no favour dressing it up as one.
And the deeper limit is that no software decides who owns a job. It can show you plainly that nobody has picked a thing up, and it can put a name against it the moment somebody does, but the agreeing on who takes what on a Monday morning is a conversation between people, and it stays that way, and a firm has to go and have it its self. A tool makes the not-deciding visible, which is a great deal more than a distribution list ever did, on account of a list being perfectly happy to let a message go unanswered by five people at once and never mention it to anybody.
Where to start, if this sounds like your address
Do the cheap test first, since it costs nothing and it takes a morning. Send an ordinary looking message into your own client address from an outside account, the way a customer would, then wait and see what happens to it. How long before anybody answers at all. Then see does a second one go and answer it as well, an hour behind the first. And look at whether the reply comes from the firm or out of one man’s own address. Then go and ask each name on the list what they thought happened to that message, and you will hear four different answers, which is the whole finding in one go.
After that, the honest question is only whether replies are expected at that address. If they are not, leave the list where it is, it is doing its job. If they are, you can put Maxdesk on the address you already have and watch it work against real messages inside a few minutes, which is a more honest test of whether any of this is for you than reading another page about it would ever be.