email forwarding or pop account for response handling ?

[JavaReb]

This might be more of a email topic, but its related to my website. I want to enable two people to recieve email when someone visits our website and fills out a form. Ok, no problem, just set the email delivery up as forwarded to those two addresses. However, you could also setup a pop account and give both these people access to that account. Then comes the question - how does one user know that the other responded already ? My suggestion is that whenever they respond, they also copy the address that was being forwarded from.

thoughts ?

So for example:
A customer sends an email to [e-mail]
This gets forwarded to [e-mail] and [e-mail]

Then [e-mail] responds to customer, but [e-mail] has no idea thatthe response went out - unless sales@somedomain was copied on the response email.

Anyone have a better way to handle this situation ?

[JavaReb]

Well, wait a minute. Now that I just typed that, I already favor setting up a pop account, because the user would see the reply from the forwarding address (yahooblabla.com) instead of mydomain. Pop account it is. I wonder if the "sent" mail will be updated for both users if they are using desktop email client ?

[Demaestro]

Java, POP is not the solution for you. IMAP is.

You said you have two people that will get the email. Are they on different computers? If yes the POP is out of the question.

The way POP works is, an email program connects to the POP server and the POP pushes all the messages from itself to the computer that the email client connected from, and then the server purges those messages.

So if I send an email and person1 looks at it it will be transferred to person1's computer. If 1 minute later person2 connects they won't see the email from me because it was pushed to person1's computer.

The way an IMAP server works is the message is stored on the server and viewed in your email client from the server until such time that you delete it or transfer it to a local folder.

So if I send a message and person1 looks at it person2 can come along and look at it at the same time. As long as their is a protocol about storing emails locally and deleting them then it is a much easy solution. Plus if you get enough memory you can store all the message on the IMAP server so you can see them from hotel/cafe computers if need be.

Also if for what ever reason down the road you want to have webmail IMAP is the more viable solution.

[edited by: Demaestro at 5:50 pm (utc) on Aug. 14, 2008]

[janharders]

If you're looking at a potential massive email traffic to be handled by multiple people, you really don't want to waste your time with the email-client-approach, you want a ticket system (OTRS: free, Jira: commercial, but great!). Even with IMAP, it'd still involve some work flow ("how do I know that someone is already working on that issue?") and storage ("how do I know which issues are closed while keeping them for future reference") issues. a ticket system will handle just that and give you a lot of extra value.

[piatkow]

We handled this on MS Exchange at work by using a group mailbox. One rule, if you don't deal with it then you set it back to "read".

If you are relying on third party service providers for email then it is a lot more difficult. For as community group that I am volunteer webmaster of we have to use JavaReb's system to let people communicate with the committee through a single address. (People otherwise just emailed the committee member who they last had dealings with)

[janharders]

>> (People otherwise just emailed the committee member who they last had dealings with)

exactly. And it's always a nice addon to be able to see the complete case-history of any contact without having to ask everyone what they replied to earlier emails. Sure, one could do that with Exchange (I guess) and with IMAP (with some clients having the option to automatically store a copy of each sent mail on the IMAP-server), but it's much easier to use a system that is designed for that kind of stuff.

[JavaReb]

Yes, I think a web based solution would be best. Something that lets the visitor fill out a form which saves the message in a database. Then one or more people are notified, which then can respond to this message within the website itself via a different form. It almost sounds like a forum of some type is needed, but it shouldnt be publicly viewable.