In a shared mailbox, the question that matters is simple: which email is nobody on yet? In Trupeo the answer has a view of its own, “To assign”.
Where to find it
On a computer, everything starts from the column on the left. At the top, the mailbox’s name: click it to switch to another mailbox, add one, or open “Settings for this mailbox”. Below it come “Search”, “New email” and “Notifications”, then the three everyday views:
- For me: the emails you’re on.
- To assign: the emails nobody is on yet.
- Still to do: everything that isn’t done yet, those two together.
Only “For me” and “To assign” carry a number beside their name: how many emails are waiting for you. If you are looking for the old To handle view, it is “Still to do”.
Further down come “Done”, “All”, “Spam” and “Trash”, then the “Labels” section (“Folders” on an IMAP or Outlook mailbox), folded at first. At the very bottom, “What’s new”, “Help”, “Settings”, and your name, which opens your account’s menu: “Account settings”, “Add a mailbox”, “Collapse the menu”, which shrinks the column to its icons, and “Sign out”.
“Search”, or the / key, looks through the whole mailbox: see
Find an email again. “Notifications” opens the page of what
Trupeo tells you about, with the number of new ones: see
Set up your notifications. Just under it,
“Contacts” opens the mailbox’s address book: see
The shared address book.
“Help” offers the articles about the screen you are on, under “For this screen”, with “Browse the help center” and “Write to us” to ask us your question. “Settings” sorts the settings into two groups: “This mailbox”, for what concerns the whole team, and “Your account”, for what concerns only you.
On a phone, the list fills the screen. At the top, the view’s name and the mailbox’s (tap it to switch mailboxes), “Search” and the notifications bell. At the bottom, a bar goes from one view to another: “For me”, “To assign” and “Still to do”, with the same numbers, and “More”, which opens the rest: “Contacts” first, then “Done”, “All”, “Spam”, “Trash”, the labels or folders, “What’s new”, “Help”, “Settings” and your account. “New email” sits just above the bar. See also Install Trupeo on your phone.
Trupeo opens on “For me” in a team’s mailbox. When you have nothing yet, “For me” says so, counts the emails waiting for someone and offers “See the emails to assign”. A link to one email, from a notification for example, always opens that email. The starting view is no longer set in the profile: every mailbox opens this way.
What the To assign view shows
At the top of the list, the view’s name, then “Nobody is on them yet”. As soon as someone is on an email, or the email is marked done, it leaves the view for the whole team. When nothing is left, Trupeo shows “Someone is already on every email.”
Each row gives the person, the subject, the start of the email, its labels, the number of team notes beside a small page, and the time. A dot in the margin, before the row, and a name in bold mean something arrived since you last opened that email: a new email, or a note written by a member. Your own replies and notes never count. The mark is yours alone: a member who opens the email does not clear it for you.
Under the list, a line says how many emails were marked done today, and by whom for the last one.
If the view is full of old emails copied when the mailbox was connected, the owner can put everything from before a chosen day in “Done”, without archiving anything at your email provider: see How emails arrive in Trupeo.
Why it exists
In an ordinary shared mailbox, everyone sees the same emails and nobody knows who is doing what. Two situations keep coming back: two people answer the same person ten minutes apart, or each one thinks the other has it and the email sits unanswered for three days. We took the first one apart in how to avoid duplicate email replies, if you want the reasoning behind this page.
As long as an email is in “To assign”, it belongs to nobody. That is a state the whole team can see, not something in one member’s head.
The one habit to build
Choose “I’ll take it” before you write your reply.
Replying does not put you on the email by itself. If you reply without choosing “I’ll take it”, the email stays in “To assign” and a member can reply right after you without knowing.
Open an email from the view: it fills the space to the right of the list. Under its subject, a line says where it stands, here “To assign”. Under the last email, a bar offers “I’ll take it”, “Reply”, “Mark done” and “Assign to…”, then ”⋯” (“Other actions”), which holds the rest. On a phone, the email fills the screen and its bar stays at the bottom, under your thumb: it keeps “I’ll take it” and “Assign” (“I’ll take it” alone on a small phone, “Assign to…” then moving into ”⋯”), “Mark done” moves into the ”⋯” menu, and “Reply to this email” is in each email’s own menu. “I’ll take it” when you take the email, “Assign to…” to choose the member who will be on it, and “Mark done” when there is nothing left to do.
None of these asks you to confirm: a message shows straight away with “Undo”, to go back if you got it wrong.
You can also act from the list, without opening the email:
- Point at a row and two buttons take the place of the time: “I’ll take it” and “Assign to…”.
- A right click on the row opens its menu.
- The boxes: tick several emails and the selection bar takes the place of the view’s title. Its buttons are icons, and each one says its name under the pointer: see Say who’s on an email.
On a phone, swipe a row to the right for “I’ll take it”, to the left for “Mark done”. A long press on a row ticks it.
With the keyboard, on a computer, ↑ and ↓ go from one email of the list to the
next, Enter opens the email, Space ticks it, Esc closes the email or clears the
selection, / opens the search, and Ctrl + Z (⌘ + Z on a Mac) undoes the last
action while “Undo” is on screen. ? shows the whole list, “Keyboard
shortcuts”. No single letter does anything: the keyboard does nothing you did
not ask for.
Trupeo adds a safety net: while someone is writing a reply, the open email says so under its subject, for example “Marie is writing a reply”, and in “For me” the email’s row says “Marie is writing”. That only shows at the last moment. Who is on what, on the other hand, shows in the list.
If nobody takes the email
An email that stays in “To assign” for ten minutes without anyone opening or taking it lets the whole team know. The notification reads “Jean Dupont is still waiting for a reply”. Opened from “Notifications”, the email shows beside them with its “I’ll take it” button: you take it without leaving the notifications, and the notification then says who is on it.
It stops by itself as soon as someone acts: opening the email is enough, in Trupeo or in Gmail or Outlook, as is taking it, replying to it or marking it done. Nobody has to silence it by hand.
That reminder is what makes the To assign view reliable even on days nobody looks at it. If your team works without ever saying who is on what, it is also the one that will reach you most often: you set it in your notifications.
What happens when someone takes it
The email leaves “To assign” for the whole team. It goes into the “For me” of the person chosen, and stays in “Still to do”, where everyone reads their name on the row. Under the open email’s subject, it reads “Alex is on it”.
If you made a mistake, “Undo” sends it back to the To assign view while the message is on screen. Later, “Unassign” does the same: it is in the ”⋯” menu, at the end of the email’s bar.
A mailbox with one member
When you are alone on a mailbox, with no invitation waiting, there is nobody to hand an email to. Trupeo then shows only two views, “Still to do” and “Done”, and opens on “Still to do”. There is no “For me”, no “To assign”, no “I’ll take it” and no “Assign to…”. As soon as you invite someone, the mailbox gets a team’s views back.
What comes next
For the details of these gestures, how to hand an email to a member, and how to pick up an email that was already done, see Say who’s on an email. To read a conversation, its emails, its notes and what happened to it, see How Trupeo groups emails into conversations.