Remove conversation owner from emails sent from records

[SRoberts]

One of our teams has a conversations inbox set up (they need to send from a central email not individual ones) and, when they are in the inbox and are going to pick up an email, they will assign that conversation to themselves so other team members know it's being dealt with.

Once they have responded, they unassign the conversation and then close it. This works for emails where the contact has emailed in first as, when the contact then responds, the conversation is reopened and is still unassigned.

However, when one of the team are working on a different record, such as Contacts, Companies or Deals, and they create a new email to a contact, that then sits in the sent folder assigned to the user that sent the email. That means, when the contact responds, the conversation is automatically associated to the person that sent the original email.

This is not suitable for this team as they do not have assigned work, everyone deals with everything which, at the moment, can mean that people assume someone else is dealing with an email as they are the owner when in fact they are not so the email gets ignored, especially if someone is off sick or on holiday.

I need to somehow make sure that when an email is sent from another record and there is no contact response yet, the conversation owner is removed.

Does anyone have any ideas how I could do this as I'm happy to create a workflow or something to get this done but I can't work out how to drill down into the Sent folder to do this.