8 ms·
Email transparency
- pbiggar 14y agoThis 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.
- greggman 14y agoI'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. :-(
- andrenotgiant 14y agoI would imagine that this open email policy actually reduces the amount of lawsuit-relevant emails in one sense: If you want to talk about something sensitive or private you would probably pick up the phone or walk over to the person, knowing an email is shared with the entire company.
- quasque 14y agoThis is a real risk. One company I worked for had me modify already sent and archived emails and Yahoo Messenger logs to remove incriminating evidence in preparation for an expected unfair dismissal trial. And also conveniently 'lose' the backup tapes for the period where the original data existed. Thankfully it was settled out of court. Mind you, the dishonesty was rife there. The boss had me scan in his cellphone bills and edit to remove all records of calls to his mistress, so he could print them out (as 'photocopies') and prove to his wife that he wasn't cheating on her. Kind of regret all that now, but payment alleviates conscience.
- pc86 14y ago> but payment alleviates conscience. That's disgusting.
- quasque 14y ago"That's disgusting." I agree. This was years ago - I wouldn't do it now as I have financial freedom and (probably) a higher standard of morals. But back then, keeping my employers satisfied so my sole source of income was safe, was a large motivator.
- gertef 14y agoHave you notified his wife and apologized for lying to her? If not, you are still hurting her today.
- quasque 14y agoNo, and I'm not going to. I can't see how it would help anyone involved, especially several years on. Anyway I don't even know who she is, or if they're even married any more.
- eli 14y agoErr, IANAL, but you may have committed a crime by tampering with evidence even though it was a civil case.
- quasque 14y agoQuite probably. I was most relieved when it wasn't taken to court.
- otterley 14y agoDefinitely in California, if not most states: "Every person who, knowing that any book, paper, record, instrument in writing, or other matter or thing, is about to be produced in evidence upon any trial, inquiry, or investigation whatever, authorized by law, willfully destroys or conceals the same, with intent thereby to prevent it from being produced, is guilty of a misdemeanor." (Cal. Pen. Code. S. 135)
- jzieger2 14y agoHi (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 14y agoRandom 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 14y agoI 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.
- shykes 14y agoVery 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 14y agoWe help them create their filters when they join. We'll hopefully make this part more streamlined over time.
- collision 14y agoThe 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 14y agoSpeaking 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 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.
- toomuchtodo 14y agoDo you create filter "roles", so certain roles have default filter sets upon creation?
- gdb 14y agoWe don't. People end up choosing the various lists they want to be on, so it wouldn't make much sense to do so.
- buro9 14y agoWhat software do you use to run the lists? Just some majordomo, or mailman software?
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- spicyj 14y agoSounds like they use Google Groups.
- redmattred 14y agoThat sounds like a lot of email to keep up with.
- alan_cx 14y agoAnd 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.
- jsaxton86 14y ago"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 14y agoYes, 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 14y agoIn 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.
- dsl 14y agoYikes. I was just skimming HN before a meeting to talk about how we are going to handle payment flow. Literally just put a huge question mark next to Stripe on my list now.
- pc 14y agoA compromised employee machine will always cause problems. (Just look at Google, the New York Times, etc.) We're obviously careful about what goes in email, and I think the open-by-default policy largely makes the security properties of email clearer. (I.e., don't put sensitive material here.)
- Maascamp 14y agoThis 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.
- silverlake 14y agoWhy not use Yammer or similar? We are trying G+ for business apps. It's ok.
- gdb 14y agoWe'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 14y agoExactly. The idea of copying email from one inbox to another "shared inbox" is painful.
- petenixey 14y agoI'm interested in this too - doesn't yammer address exactly this problem?
- alanmeaney 14y agoYou could give our newly launched application a try. We're working hard to be a twitter for tasks/teams. http://taskmessenger.com http://taskmessenger.com
- pbreit 14y agoI can see Yammer not quite working right for this scenario. But HipChat came to mind.
- Togosha 14y agoYammer sucks, you are better off using free tools, like Bitrix24. If you need PM, I recommend Wrike or Basecamp.
- d0m 14y agoHow 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 14y agoSupport 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.
- us3rn4m3 14y agoahem. what you have described, is Yammer...
- noahl 14y agoI'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.)
- Terretta 14y agoPart 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.
- ngoel36 14y agoWhen 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.
- nands 14y agoLists 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 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
- codenerdz 14y agoNearly 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
- jorangreef 14y agoI 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).