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.