Ticket system that runs off emails

July 3, 2008 1:57 PM

Is there a good ticket/support/bug management system that builds a queue out of incoming emails?

e.g. user sends an email to [e-mail]; the management system receives the email, adds the body to a queue where I can assign it, add updates, mark as done, and do all the other normal ticket system things with.

posted by c:\awesome to computers & internet (16 answers total)

Oh, something web-based, please, with pretty Web 2.0 colors!
posted by c:\awesome at 2:04 PM on July 3, 2008

RT can do this.
posted by mkb at 2:07 PM on July 3, 2008

RT if your cheap. FogBugz if you have a budget. Trac if your developing software.
posted by SirStan at 2:12 PM on July 3, 2008

It's not web based, but RT is a great tool that has a web interface (review). It is also open source.
posted by mostly_impossible at 2:13 PM on July 3, 2008

mostly: RT is entirely webbased. Even the perl script that tosses tickets into the system from emails uses an API exposed by the web interface.
posted by SirStan at 2:14 PM on July 3, 2008

RT is excellent. I use it daily at work for IT inquiries from faculty and it's easy to track, comment, reply and keep a history - it's especially useful if you have multiple people who need to access this queue.
posted by cgomez at 2:21 PM on July 3, 2008

We used HEAT for our customer service software when I was still in development.
posted by skewedoracle at 2:23 PM on July 3, 2008

nthing RT.
posted by rmd1023 at 2:27 PM on July 3, 2008

RT looks okay, but way overboard for what I need it for.
posted by c:\awesome at 2:28 PM on July 3, 2008

c:\awesome, you may find telling us how the options presented wouldn't work, or what they do well/don't do well would help us discuss the matter.

A company I worked for used RT extensively at a small company that handled ~20 issues a week. It is hardly overboard, rather, it is a solid platform for providing basic email correspondence. There really isn't a whole lot simpler that still provides a web interface. Once you have the very basic level of features RT provides, you will wonder how you worked without them.
posted by SirStan at 2:59 PM on July 3, 2008

I've always been partial to glpi. easy to setup, lightweight, nice integration with ocs hardware inventory system if desired, responsive developers.
posted by dorian at 3:26 PM on July 3, 2008

We use Fogbugz at work and although we don't use the email-to-ticket functionality we're generally pleased with it as a piece of software. It's got a pretty reasonable installation/upgrade procedure from the systems side too.

I've heard of OTRS in the same context, no experience with it though.
posted by Skorgu at 4:12 PM on July 3, 2008

Lighthouse seems to do evreything I want, with nifty Web 2.0 colors! Is it lame to best answer yourself?
posted by c:\awesome at 4:19 PM on July 3, 2008

HelpLine does this.
(Full disclosure: My mother works for the the (small) software company that created it.)
posted by EndsOfInvention at 4:26 PM on July 3, 2008

RT is what we use, but we're moving to JIRA.

RT can be as easy or as complex as you want. We hate it because the query builder is slow as hell, it's built in perl/mason (which we don't support for any other part of our infrastructure) and it can kinda be overkill.

Another one that we've also used, but I don't know if it's currently maintained, is flyspray.
posted by SpecialK at 4:55 PM on July 3, 2008

i'll throw in my usual eventum recommendation here. it's what the mysql support team uses.
posted by jimw at 8:31 PM on July 3, 2008