
Email transparency - xal
https://stripe.com/blog/email-transparency
======
greggman
I've known companies that had pretty good email policies....until they got
sued and every email debate was turned into the evidence that they knew X or
considered Y or thought about Z and were therefore guilty. :-(

~~~
jzieger2
Hi (I'm Stripe's lawyer). Litigation discovery is something that any company
needs to think about when crafting its email policy. But whether an email goes
to a few individual recipients or to a broader list won't impact whether it
needs to be disclosed in discovery. The seemingly private email between two or
three co-workers will almost always persist in someone's inbox for a very long
time, and ultimately be discovered.

In most cases, the kinds of emails you are talking about -- where someone says
something that can be mischaracterized or otherwise damaging to the company in
the future -- are a result of poor judgment. And that's where I think Stripe's
policy has a distinct advantage. When people know they're sending things to a
broader group of recipients they tend to be more thoughtful in how they
communicate and just avoid saying many of the imprudent things that would be
troublesome in future discovery.

~~~
UnoriginalGuy
Random question relating to both e-mail and the law...

So everyone puts these signatures/disclaimers on their e-mail now which say
(paraphrasing):

> This message is confidential. It may also be privileged or otherwise
> protected by work product immunity or other legal rules. If you have
> received it by mistake, please let us know by e-mail reply and delete it
> from your system; you may not copy this message or disclose its contents to
> anyone. Please send us by fax any message containing deadlines as incoming
> e-mails are not screened for response deadlines. The integrity and security
> of this message cannot be guaranteed on the Internet.

Or similar. Do these things actually have a legal purpose/meaning? I mean can
you really enforce a contract the other person hasn't agreed to? Can you
really demand what THEY do with an e-mail YOU sent them?

A few years ago I thought this stuff was silly but now a lot of big companies
are doing it and I can only assume these companies have a legal department...

PS - If you were to reply I wouldn't assume it was legal advice, I am asking
you as a person who just happens to be a lawyer, not as a lawyer. :)

~~~
jzieger2
I think people do these things mainly to deal with inadvertent disclosure
(e.g., an incorrectly addressed email) or further downstream distribution of
an email. The idea is to have some indicator that the original sender meant
the communication to remain in confidence (which may be required to maintain,
for example, attorney client privilege, or to preserve trade secret
protection). When they are affixed automatically to every email (as they are
by many firms), I really doubt they work. I'm not aware of any case where the
existence of this kind of disclaimer has been a factor, and I suspect most
people put this in the "it couldn't hurt" category, rather than really
thinking it'll be effective. Would be interested to hear if anyone is aware of
evidence to the contrary.

~~~
yajoe
They are effectively worthless if it can be shown they are added automatically
to every mail. Privileged communication requires something explicit or genuine
intent, i.e. the sender writing 'privileged' at the top. It actually can be
quite bad if it's shown that the privileged communication was abused (either
in terms of piercing all veils or censure).

My experience is people add these signatures because they see other people
doing it and they assume it's a good practice or seemingly professional. It
may be some inexperienced lawyers recommend it so they have something to say
about email policy. It's not hurting anyone beyond eating up mail quotas,
right?

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jsaxton86
"We use Gmail for email and Google Groups for lists."

"What we have today works pretty well for our current size—around 45 people."

So if I can manage to get the Google authentication credentials for just one
of Stripe's 45 employees, I can get access to the vast majority of Stripe's
email? I hope they require two factor authentication.

~~~
cristinacordova
Yes, we do require two factor auth, and we're very stringent about laptop
security generally. We're pretty cognizant that, even at a less open company,
compromising any employee can generally be used to obtain a surprising amount
of sensitive company information.

~~~
jessaustin
In light of this issue, what have you done to restrict the amount of harm that
even a trusted employee can do? I'd be happy to learn that after a suitable
time period for disputes, literally _no employee_ would be able to provide any
demographic info related to a particular charge. You can't harm my customers
if you don't have access to their data.

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shykes
Very cool experiment. How do you deal with less technical people in the team
who don't find it fun to tweak email filters all day long? Is your tooling to
the point of polish where that's no longer an issue? Or are you simply at a
stage where you don't (yet) need to hire non technical people? We've found
this to be the main obstacle in getting full adoption for things like this.

~~~
pc
We help them create their filters when they join. We'll hopefully make this
part more streamlined over time.

~~~
collision
The Google Groups webface is also getting good enough that you can keep up
with some lists without having to actually subscribe to them via email.

~~~
cristinacordova
Speaking as a non-technical person at Stripe, the google groups web interface
good, but not great. Andreas on our team built a filter manager, which makes
it much easier: <https://github.com/antifuchs/gmail-britta>

I was all set up with filters on my first day and then made tweaks over my
first couple of weeks to improve efficiency.

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pbiggar
This is cool. We had cargo-culted the idea of open email and CCing the entire
company at CircleCi, so its great to see the details exposed. Looks like that
structure will be really useful once we get a few more people.

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nands
Lists work well to a certain extent but would not be suitable for a number of
cases. Say a team member decides to add an existing email conversation to the
list at a later point in time. This would break the original email thread
structure when added to list. What happens to an email in a conversation which
came from someone outside the company. Someone forwards it to list again? Say
someone forgets to do a "reply all" in an ongoing conversation, this email
never lands up in the list.

We like using email for most of our tasks too. We use our own product GrexIt's
(<http://grexit.com>) Shared Labels to share information and even collaborate
right from our email inbox. Shared labels allow you to share particular Gmail
label among a group of people in your company. Every email conversation on
which a shared label is applied gets pushed to the user's inbox who were part
of the shared label. All followup emails that arrive in an ongoing
conversation also keep getting shared automatically. This approach requires
minimal effort to share information and works better than lists. Most
importantly users continue to access information from their inbox itself.

We use the shared labels approach for a variety of use cases like support and
development. As soon as support email arrives to the support@ email-id it get
shared with everyone. We have shared labels with every team member's name, say
Task:John. To assign an email to someone, we simply apply the user's shared
label on that email. This allows us to collaborate easily without needing any
3rd party tools

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silverlake
Why not use Yammer or similar? We are trying G+ for business apps. It's ok.

~~~
gdb
We've tried Yammer, and it's never really taken off. The nice thing about just
copying an email to a list is the barrier to entry is so low -- the sender
doesn't have to open a new tab, or create any additional content.

~~~
nands
Exactly. The idea of copying email from one inbox to another "shared inbox" is
painful.

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codenerdz
Nearly all of these use cases are covered by a number of social enterprise
platforms such as Yammer or Socialcast without the need for new employees to
setup filters.

In Socialcast activity streams can be filtered by groups which could be
public, private or externally facing(meaning you can invite people outside
your company to participate in them). People can be notified directly by
@-mentioning them in your posts and so forth. And of course all the content is
searchable and filterable.

The usefulness of these social enterprise tools was not clear to me until I
saw it being used in both a 40-people company and a 13,000-people company. It
brings about collaboration, transparency, a way for people to discuss their
issues and to often vent about things they dont like.

Maybe its time for Stripe to check it out too :)

Disclaimer: I work for Socialcast, the VMWare company

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Maascamp
This is an interesting tactic. I think it can work well for companies up to a
certain size, at which point new hires start getting auto added to certain
lists and you start to have enterprise email issues (I think Stripe will
manage to avoid this fate though) ;)

This is a timely article for me though. We actually did a Show HN earlier
today for a product (lightermail.com) whose ideal use is exactly this
scenario. It allows people to control the flow of email from specific senders
or domains. We see it being ideal for companies who have these sort of mailing
lists, because it allows employees to subscribe to all the relevant lists
without getting distracted by all the associated email throughout the day.

Good luck with your experiment! It will be interesting to see how it goes.

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noahl
I'm curious about your thoughts on mailing lists vs. private newsgroups. I
think of email and news as just two different ways of sharing MIME messages,
with the difference that email is sent to specific people and newsgroups are
stored on a server and can be archived and made (semi-)public.

I realize that newsgroups have received much, much less attention than email
recently, and it may just be that there isn't enough software support for news
to make it worth bothering with, but it does seem like a mailing list with
archives is a lot like what news was trying to accomplish. (The only other big
difference I can think of is push vs. pull notifications. But newsgroup
readers can fetch all new messages, so I don't think that's a big deal.)

~~~
mkopinsky
Can you send an email and cc a newsgroup?

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ams6110
Assuming you're talking about an nntp newsgroup then yes, if you're running a
mail-to-news gateway.

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ngoel36
When I was an engineer at Google, most Googlers tended to handle the email the
same way. And of course, all 50k+ employees used the same Gmail and Google
Groups as you and me.

I absolutely loved the system, and I've convinced my startups and
organizations use solely Google Groups to communicate as well. Especially as
an engineer in a company with thousands of simultaneous projects, it was
extremely helpful to have a searchable archive of every conversation or set of
meeting notes that was relevant to something I was working on.

The legal liabilities, however, that this system could obviously bring up, as
greggman mentioned, are an entirely different conversation.

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d0m
How do you handle customers' emails? Is support@stripe going to a "support"
mailing list? How do you make sure every email is answered only once? I.e.
that all the team can see the conversation and can opt-in optionally. Thanks!

~~~
zt
Support emails do not go to the support@ mailing list, they're handled through
a helpdesk management tool that allows us to see full contact history, etc.

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Terretta
Part of the issue around transparency is that email inbox silos may be the
wrong tool for a collaborative and productive tech company.

In general, email is now being seen (as often remarked by ShowHN MVPs) as To
Do lists, and in a tech shop, multiple people have an interest in that
process. This results in unenforceable policies about To: vs Cc: and unwieldy
threads you're never sure if you should delete the tail nested indent history
from. As the ShowHN projects assert, email's a poor To Do list tracker.

To refine that slightly, emails tend to be _requests_.

You don't create a new email thread to give yourself a To Do item. You create
a new email thread to ask someone for something. The recipient doesn't care
about your agenda. You're the interested party asking, and you need to track
your requests.

Employees and clients email requesting action from someone: do this for me,
let me do this for you, give me a resource, read this, take action on this,
file this, and of course, receive a copy of this to cover my ass. Your To Do
items (emails) are now in their lists (inboxes), and once there, you've lost
control over the prioritization and handling of them. You'll probably lose
visibility too, the moment you stop getting CC'd on your own email thread.

So, we quit using email.

Instead, we use Request Tracker, tracking all those requests. Instead of the
Inbox, we have the RT dashboard, backed by automation with full extensibility:

    
    
        http://bestpractical.com/rt/screenshots.html
        http://bestpractical.com/rt/features.html
        http://bestpractical.com/rt/extensions.html
    

We all use it, and clients are trained (by sales, by contract, and by firm
account managment and support response) to use tickets for anything as well.
If there's no ticket, you didn't really request it. RT makes this easy,
because the client can still just use email -- there's no web interface (well,
there is, but they don't have to use it) for them to have to learn. They can
just email a team (internally, an RT "ticket queue") and be sure the team will
sort out who's handling it with an SLA promise.

If someone on a team has a family emergency, it's no issue, as anyone else on
the team can take over that person's tickets till they're back, and
immediately see the whole history.

All this is public within the company and fully searchable, going back about a
decade.

When I said above we quit using email, I lied!

We actually all use email, but what we're emailing are RT tickets. So
throughout the day, we can use any email capable device in the world to
interact with this shared request handling history. RT automates the history
and the cc lists. You can search your own requests using your email client, or
hit the web interface to search everything. Through the web interface we enjoy
the benefits of the dashboard summary, automatic response SLA monitoring,
cross linked issue tracking, and visibility/searchability by everyone.

Note that RT can pick apart email addresses and subject lines, so you can
route all your RT queues through a single Gmail account if you want, spam
protecting your system and giving you a master archive searchable using
Google's search tools as well.

Stripe is essentially slowly reinventing Best Practical's Request Tracker.
Might be worth giving RT a try.

~~~
buu700
_You don't create a new email thread to give yourself a To Do item_

Maybe I'm just weird, but I do this pretty frequently (fire off quick
instructions/reminders with "TODO:" prepended); after all, there's very little
besides email that I care enough about to check frequently enough for any
action items I assign to myself to matter.

I understand and agree with the idea behind the "Show HN" projects you
mention, but as a potential user, at the end of the day all I really care
about is that my personal system/workflow works and helps me get stuff done,
not how structured or semantically beautiful my data is. The last thing I need
is yet another application/service to demand time/attention from my day.

(On a similar note, I've never been able to commit myself to a well-organised
file structure with meaningful nested directories, an indexing system, and so
forth, when a flat directory holding tens of thousands of files + ls and
whatever regexes has Just Worked for me for years, despite not being pretty.)

~~~
jeremysmyth
_Maybe I'm just weird, but I do this [send emails as todo items] pretty
frequently (fire off quick instructions/reminders with "TODO:" prepended);_

It's also something that I do indirectly via Google Now or Samsung Voice -
launch it, say "Note to self - Fix a time with Patricia" or "Remind me to book
train tickets". It sends an email to me with that content.

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redmattred
That sounds like a lot of email to keep up with.

~~~
alan_cx
And then, too often, you need to speak to the sender to find out what the
email actually meant in the first place, only to find out that it had no
relevance to you.

I like the info sharing and should lead to increased efficiency, but its
something that IMHO needs very careful scrutiny.

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jorangreef
I have been working on this use case of private/shared email and have been
testing in private beta for a year with a firm of 40 staff. If you are
interested, please send me an email (joran@ronomon.com).

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buro9
What software do you use to run the lists? Just some majordomo, or mailman
software?

~~~
spicyj
Sounds like they use Google Groups.

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us3rn4m3
ahem. what you have described, is Yammer...

