email handling

best way to handle inbound emails with multiple users

[gibbon]

We are trying to find the best solution for a mail server.

Our fundamental problem is that we get 100's of emails to our [e-mail] email addy each day.

We have 3 people capable of answering these mails, however as we are using a POP account only 1 person has the emails in their mail client.

We have tried to forward the emails around the office manually, but this gets very messy. We need this to be done automatically. Is there a simple way to do this?

We have looked at exchange server, does this provide this feature? I have looked at the tech documentation for hours but dont seem to make head nor tail of it (loads of consultant talk but not much about the nitty gritty of what it actually does)

I do apologise in advance if this is a daft question, but I cant find an answer for this and the email problem is really affecting our service levels.

Many thanks in advance

Gibbon

[dkubb]

The simplest solution I can see is to have all email accepted to your [e-mail] address sent through an application that forwards each mail off to each person "round robin" style.

I've set up systems where the mail server is qmail, and there's a list of email addresses an application forwards to. When the application recieves an email it:

1. locks the list so nothing else can read or write to it
   
2. opens the file
   
3. reads in the first email address
   
4. writes all remaining email addresses back to the list
   
5. writes the first email address to the bottom of the list
   
6. closes and unlocks the email list
   
7. forwards the email to the first email address it originally grabbed
   

This simply shuffles the top email address back down to the bottom of the "deck", making it so that on average each person gets an equal number of emails forwarded to them. This algoritm works fine whether there's two people in the list or 20, or even more. You have to make sure when you design something like this, that it can handle recieving messages in parallel; which is why I do the explicit locking in the above algo.

As I said, this is the simplest approach I can think of. It certainly might be true that some emails take longer to answer than others, or that some people may have a higher volume of mail from other sources and this could overload them, so its far from a perfect email load balancing system. However in my experience it works fine for teams the size you describe.

[mat]

Pretty much any mail server would do this for you, as long as it is capable of running some sort of filter/check on all incoming mail. This program could sit on any box on the LAN (doesn't need to be a true server) and would be set up to check your POP account(s) and filter/file messages locally.

Your users would then send/check mail through this box, not direct to external mail server.

Exchange Server would seem to be a sledgehammer to crack a nut; a five-client email server would cost you very little, in fact there are many free ones.

[gibbon]

thanks guys

will take a look at both options - pressure relieved a bit :)

Gibbon

[SEO practioner]

Gibbon: dkubb's suggestion looks good

Good luck