Need a better email answering solution

[carols10cents]

The problems I'm hoping to solve are:

• We lose track of some emails and never respond to them because there isn't visibility into what emails we've gotten and whether we've responded to or not
• We also lose track of emails because no one is "assigned"
• In some cases we've responded too much, or with conflicting information, because it seems like a quick response that someone can just handle but then it turns out we have some discussion to do that we should have taken before responding

What I'm imagining is:

• Email to core@ comes in and gets added to some sort of tracking system automatically (GitHub issue in a private repository?)
• (if it's garbage someone can just delete it)
• We can discuss asynchronously who should respond with what, if there seems to be enough consensus (auto checkboxes? if 3 thumbs up and no thumbs down after 72 hrs, then sending is ok?), someone can take the initiative to respond
• In triage meetings, we check in on anything stuck in this system
• Permissions can be synced with GitHub+the teams repo

is this... Salesforce? ZenDesk? It feels customer-support-ey.

Crates.io also needs this functionality, and I'd love for both core and crates.io to use the same mechanism. I'm tracking my investigations for crates.io over here.

[github-actions[bot]]

This issue is an item on the Core Team's public agenda, and the team will discuss it every week during the triage meeting. The goal of the issue is to provide a public record of our discussion, so only members of the Core Team are allowed to comment here.

Please get in touch with the Core Team by emailing [email protected] if you have something to add!

[steveklabnik]

Triage: no real updates this week.

[steveklabnik]

relevance folks not in attendance, so no updates

[steveklabnik]

@carols10cents has tried something, but it wasn't ideal. (Carol, I missed the name of the thing you tried)

[carols10cents]

I'm testing out HelpMonk. If anyone wants to give it a try, let me know and I'll add you!

[steveklabnik]

No updates, as the people involved were not in attendance.

[Manishearth]

Update from triage: no update.