Email, email, and more email. If you run a web hosting company or other IT business, you likely get tons of email. Though the 1000+ messages per month we used to get to our support account have dropped significantly since moving to a helpdesk system, we still get 1000's of messages per month from news alerts, security systems, our partners, our vendors and clients. One solution we've found that helps ease the burden is IMAP plus Thunderbird. Using these two systems, we can organize, file and share email between our staff.
If you are like us, you have a number of role-based accounts. Billing, sales, support, marketing, and other accounts may be standard at your company. Manging this email is essential to keeping your clients, vendors and service partners happy. One solution we've found that works well is using IMAP with Thunderbird.
We use cyrus IMAP due to its fine-grained access control features. This allows us to setup multiple email boxes and then use a single user account to access each box.
For example, as the head-honcho here at rackAID, I like to keep tabs on all areas of our business. So, I may want to dip into the billing or sales emails to see what is going on. Rather than managing another login, I have cyrus setup to allow me to subscribe to these mail folders. Using Thunderbird, I can quickly glance at these folders and check out what is going on. IMAP keeps user-specific read vs. unread information but does mark if a message has been replied to. So if Francesca, who handles our accounting, sends a reply, I can see that she has done so.
Another benefit of this setup is when people send email to the wrong account. For example, if billing gets a support inquiry, someone can drop it over into our helpdesk email where it will get scooped up and added to our work queues. Likewise, support can transfer emails over to billing.
Lastly, cyrus support server side filtering. SquirrelMail has a tool for managing server-side sieve filters that work with cyrus. By setting up these filters, the email is sorted server-side, so we only need to maintain one set of rules. For example, all of our vendors get sorted out into a vendor folder automatically. One little drawback of this in Thunderbird is that you have to manually set the IMAP folder to automatically check for new messages. This is not a major issue, you just right click and set it, but if you've dozens of folders, you may want to override the defaults.
Overall we've found cyrus+Thunderbird to be an effective solution for our email. Combined with our DSPAM anti-spam gateway, we get little spam (>95% accuracy rates) and have our email sorted to our needs. If you have an email overload, consider moving to a much more robust email system like cyrus. The setup and configuration may take more linux know-how, but the time you save will worth it.
Now I know some of you may wonder why we don't use the helpdesk for everything? We've found that most helpdesk systems that use email to web based processing will corrupt emails, especially if they are not in UTF-8 or standard character sets. With clients in more than 20 countries, we prefer to have billing type inquiries handle by email.
