Please forgive my lack of knowledge of lingo...



I manage a team of call-center folks. They get phone calls, and they get emails.

Anyone can send an email, say, to helpdesk@mycompany.com. When an email comes in, all of the people on my team are on the helpdesk account (is this a contact list, a distribution list? not sure if you need the info. On the inside, I can send an email to *helpdesk and it gets to the same group, if that helps.)

When an email comes in, and everyone sees it, someone claims it, and sends everyone on the team an email that says "I've got this".

There must be some way to allow someone to take some action against the message, and have the message automatically update its own status, so that everyone else knows its been taken. Ideally, it would no longer show as unread for everyone, or it would be checked off, or something like that. I'm trying to get rid of the step of sending out the "i've got this" email, and trying to ensure that everyone else doesn't have to review each and every email.

Your suggestions are welcome. I'm pretty intelligent, but I may not know Outlook lingo, so feel free to paint the picture (as in "you need to go to the Developer tab and then click on...").

Thank you very much in advance for your help.

Now that I see that they have posted my Outlook version, I should say that my staff is on varying levels of Windows and Outlook. The dominant Windows is XP, and Outlook 2007.

Hi,

You don't say how many workers you have answering/sharing the mailbox, but have you considered using Outlook Categories?

The way I would envision this is that you assign a category to each person. When someone "claims ownership" over the email, he/she can simply flag the email in the shared mailbox with their own category. You could even force users to mark the email complete and clear their category after they are done with that email (so that others can quickly see if it's appropriate for them to answer any new emails from the same sender).

Hope this helps!

Mike Sperry
http://www.SperrySoftware.com
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