Shared Email box

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Shared Email box

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RS820+, DS718+
Operating system
  1. Windows
Mobile operating system
  1. iOS
Looking for some ideas for a shared email box where I can have billing emails, payment confirmations, and other joint account alerts sent to. Purpose is so that the spouse can be included on whats going on. If we create a joint email account with some services, how can we manage the email where if one looks at the email the other is still unread until they read it.

What do you guys do?
 
Pushover, Pushbullet...

Not sure those would work. If I receive a bill in a monthly email from our landscaper (to my email address) I’d like to have the wife see a copy of it too so that one of us could take care of it. Same goes for the mortgage an email alert comes in from the mort. company monthly but they only have the capability of sending it to one email address.
 
What if you create a distribution list and add the two members in it (you and your wife), use that DL for your providers. When an email is fired up to the DL, it’ll go to all of you individually.

Would that work?

That may work. I’d have to spin up my own mail server for this right? No way to do this with the current email providers that are out there today?
 
Not sure how you'd do multi-user read status so that it only goes unread after everyone has read it.

One idea that could work with two users: inbox rule that flags each incoming mail. Then the first person will cause the status to be read, but still flagged. If the other user sees the mail as read but flagged then they know they are the second to read it, now manually mark as unflagged.

Or, if your mail client / webmail client supports it, only mark as read manually and only after (while) moving to a 'actioned' folder. TBH anything in the inbox (or 'to be actioned' folder) can be thought of as unread/unprocessed until moved to the 'actioned' folder.

You can also use mail forwarders to send a copy of mail to one or more real accounts. But you will need to liaise to know that the mail has been actioned.


What we have is a personal email for each family member and then a catchall address for any other address that doesn't have its own account on our domain. I've further set up rules that redirect known 'non-account-addresses' to the right person (mostly these will be matching on a per-user 'code' in the email address, e.g. <shopname>[email protected]), and everything else gets redirected to a home account. This way I can create on-the-fly per-shop/per-website email addresses and still have them in my own inbox, and others in the shared home (e.g. utilities). Any of these that get harvested and heavily abused gets their own forwarder to a junk account.
 
Not sure how you'd do multi-user read status so that it only goes unread after everyone has read it.

One idea that could work with two users: inbox rule that flags each incoming mail. Then the first person will cause the status to be read, but still flagged. If the other user sees the mail as read but flagged then they know they are the second to read it, now manually mark as unflagged.

Or, if your mail client / webmail client supports it, only mark as read manually and only after (while) moving to a 'actioned' folder. TBH anything in the inbox (or 'to be actioned' folder) can be thought of as unread/unprocessed until moved to the 'actioned' folder.

You can also use mail forwarders to send a copy of mail to one or more real accounts. But you will need to liaise to know that the mail has been actioned.


What we have is a personal email for each family member and then a catchall address for any other address that doesn't have its own account on our domain. I've further set up rules that redirect known 'non-account-addresses' to the right person (mostly these will be matching on a per-user 'code' in the email address, e.g. <shopname>[email protected]), and everything else gets redirected to a home account. This way I can create on-the-fly per-shop/per-website email addresses and still have them in my own inbox, and others in the shared home (e.g. utilities). Any of these that get harvested and heavily abused gets their own forwarder to a junk account.

What mail server are you running?
 
I thought you’re running Synology mail on your DS.
Back to the drawing board then. Maybe find a service that provides such DLs. Unless you want to dive into the voodoo world of running your own email server :)

I wouldn’t mind it but under the condition where I don’t want to have to tinker with it every now and then, I just want it to work. Don’t want to deal with outages and such. And then there’s the whole making sure no spam messages etc.
 
And this page for Gmail groups. Don’t know much about gmail. Depending on your views, you may decide to check them or not.

I’m currently using gmail, and hotmail on the other.

So the above gmail groups link is good. You can create a distribution list , however this would only be good if I were to send an email to a group called family; it would then email each user in that group/list. This will not work for someone (or a company) on the outside emailing in to this group.

There has to be something out there though
 
Last edited:
What mail server are you running?
I have a service through Fasthosts in UK. It's one of their older hosting packages that included Outlook Web Access webmail. I just migrated from OWA 2010 to 2019 services, purely to make sure it wasn't going to be deprecated and force me to a package that uses RoundCube webmail with minimal server-side rules. (I like RoundCube and have run it at home but their's is a bit limited. It's what MailStation is based on).

The Exchange based OWA does a good job of applying inbox rules to filter an redirect mail and beats maintaining a home server.

I've up to 10 accounts with 2GB storage and AV+AS, up to 500 accounts with 100MB storage, and unlimited forwarders. Plus a catch-all for undefined addresses. It's under £100/year including a small Linux hosting package and DNS management.

The newer packages only have RoundCube mail and then it's about £5/mth per 25GB Outlook account (may include push alerts and other features, mine is just SMTP/IMAP/webmail).

I run Mail Server, with mimicked accounts, to receive a mail copy for archiving and in case 2GB isn't enough. Mostly we get mailshots and most of those get deleted every few months or so. The actual useful mails for keeping is surprisingly small in storage size.


Just seen the comments on Gmail. The final tipping point to completely move from them was finding that they have a view in your Google account for purchases ... ones that have nothing to do with Google. Here I find receipt mails from Amazon etc. It's just too creepy and who knows what they are doing with it. Yes, I know they need to monetise their users but this was too blatant. I'd stopped using Gmail as a mail redirector/filter some time ago but it still had archives. Now all archives have been moved to the NAS.
 
I couldn't help it. But there is another problem to be tackled when you solve this one. How do you know if the bill has been paid by one of you and not try to pay it again?!

For this we'll need a new invention called, READY FOR THIS, "COMMUNICATION".

We must compellingly negotiate tactical scenarios for this problem and streamline the solution (a side note, always throw “streamline” in the conversation during BS meetings, a very versatile word that no one can object to and keeps everyone at bay, because how dare they question streamlining)— For more info, please visit the BS generator thread to be found elsewhere on this forum free of charge.

You’ll need to “communicate”. We’ll need a full, secure syncing mechanism running between you. To sync or not to sync, that is the question.
 
I couldn't help it. But there is another problem to be tackled when you solve this one. How do you know if the bill has been paid by one of you and not try to pay it again?!

For this we'll need a new invention called, READY FOR THIS, "COMMUNICATION".

We must compellingly negotiate tactical scenarios for this problem and streamline the solution (a side note, always throw “streamline” in the conversation during BS meetings, a very versatile word that no one can object to and keeps everyone at bay, because how dare they question streamlining)— For more info, please visit the BS generator thread to be found elsewhere on this forum free of charge.

You’ll need to “communicate”. We’ll need a full, secure syncing mechanism running between you. To sync or not to sync, that is the question.

Usually services have notifications of a due date approaching, payment cleared, no payment received etc. Also a receipt is usually emailed.

The complications with life in 2019 is that life is so much busier than years ago. Both spouse need to work full time in order to make ends meet, at times multiple jobs. And the fact that my personal email account averages about 50 emails a day or so, my side business email is about the same, and then my work email is about 20 a day. On top of that there’s phone calls, voice mails, text messages and even group text messages, and social media platforms. And dealing with a 5 month old, life is very busy. There is communication but only for the important stuff. All this other stuff is simple desk work where I don’t need to know about on my days of work, or on my days off I can take care of. It’s more of splitting up the responsibilities and working efficiently as a team.

Think of a busy organization sometimes it’s just not feasible to talk about every little thing. Like they say smart people don’t remember stuff they can look up, this leaves storage space in the brain to for critical thinking.
 

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