Incoming Email management

How do you handle incoming service email?

[corbing]

I'm curious as to what solutions you have come up with to handle incoming "role-based" email (email to generic addresses such as sales@ or service@)?

Right now we just use a Public Folder system in Exchange with the Customer Service reps using Outlook but it's getting harder and harder to manage it efficiently.

Ideally, we would like a product that features the ability to pick generic pre-written response templates, the ability to force a standard email template so all emails have a common look, the ability to force a spell check prior to sending an email, reporting capabilities to see how many emails come in each day, how quickly they are answered, etc., and the ability to assign emails to different reps.

Am I asking for too much? Any suggestions?

[Mr Bo Jangles]

not quite the info you are seeking, but after two previous losses of a lot of archived e-mail, we've set up at our ISP for mail incoming to us to be 'cc' to a gmail account - so that's another belts and braces archive bin of all incoming e-mail.
For outgoing e-mail, we've set up Thunderbird to send a 'bcc' copy of *every* outgoing e-mail to another gmail account - again for safety. We also find the search ability in these gmail accounts excellent for locating that e-mail that thought it was hiding *_*

[jollymcfats]

The products you want are usually called "trouble ticket" or "issue tracking" systems. We use a shared IMAP folder approach similar to your Exchange setup, but I have researched systems to replace our setup.

One well-suited one is OTRS [otrs.org]. There are tons of commercial products in the space and even more open source ones. Searching freshmeat.net [freshmeat.net] for "ticket" will turn up many projects.