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View Full Version : For Discussion - setting up 'enterprise-level' email?


jmihawkins
02-14-2008, 11:07 PM
I'm starting a new thread b/c I did not mean to hijack Hannety's discussion on email systems, and I need further advice.

I'm currently running 4 stand-alone boxes, no network. Each box is essentially 'community property', accessible by whoever needs it (as available).

I want to move my email accounts off @aol.com. I have 1 primary business email account that is accessed by 4-6 different users. I have 2 business/personal email accounts that are VERY confidential and are accessed ONLY by the 2 individual recipients. One of these recipients also accesses all accounts from an i-phone.

I intend to access my replacement @example.com accounts using IMAP since it affords the global access I need. But I'm unclear how to manage the build-up of aging-out emails. I dont find a setting in QuestMail or the CNC to auto-delete after 20 days or whenever. So I assume I need to add a weekly/monthly task to manually delete? And I'm unclear how my i-phone user will have access while on the road.

I'm playing with Thunderbird (and it's limited documentation), and have installed Mulberry on 1 machine (but not yet begun wading thru the 300-page manual).

Thunderbird will let me password-protect the message pane, which is acceptable for the confidential accounts. But it appears to be a global setting rather than account-level, which pretty much defeats the purpose for me.

And to complicate matters, while I want to retain a single published incoming email address, my people want the ability to utilize 3-4 different addresses to reply from, depending on who responds to a given email, in order to establish a thread for ongoing discussions. Which of course means additional incoming addresses.

And yes, I agree with Sheila that a ServiceDesk software solution makes lots of sense. But the research I've done in that area indicates the available products range from less than useless to quite expensive, with little in-between. And there seem to be issues handling 'foreign country' emails, and we deal extensively outside the US.

Help??

sheila
02-15-2008, 01:49 AM
As far as help desk goes...

Just thought I'd mention a few that we had looked at in the past (although it was some time ago)...
Cerberus Helpdesk (http://www.cerberusweb.com/)
DeskPRO (http://www.deskpro.com/)
Kayako eSupport (http://www.kayako.com/)

Kayako eSupport is what we are using for the FutureQuest Service Desk, although we have made some mods to it, and we aren't using the latest version...

DogAndPony
02-15-2008, 05:01 PM
Oops!

Correct link to DeskPro would be:
DeskPRO (http://www.deskpro.com/)

Thanks for that, Sheila... I'm on the brink of needing a help desk system myself.

Randall
02-15-2008, 06:17 PM
Thunderbird will let me password-protect the message pane, which is acceptable for the confidential accounts. But it appears to be a global setting rather than account-level, which pretty much defeats the purpose for me. In order to secure the private accounts, you would need to create two additional "profiles" in Thunderbird. The default profile would see only the public account, while the other two profiles would see their private account plus the public one.

Similar capabilities exist in Outlook Express and Outlook; not sure about other clients. And as for the iPhone, it only has to support one user, so there's no complications involved. And to complicate matters, while I want to retain a single published incoming email address, my people want the ability to utilize 3-4 different addresses to reply from, depending on who responds to a given email, in order to establish a thread for ongoing discussions. Which of course means additional incoming addresses. This is also easy to handle in Thunderbird, though it requires a fair bit of setup time. Each email account can have multiple "identities" (Account Settings > Manage Identities). These identities don't need to have their own POP/IMAP account, just an FQ alias that points to the public account.

Thunderbird is smart enough to recognize when an incoming message in the public account is directly addressed to one of the identities, and automatically sets that identity as the From address on the reply. When someone replies to a "generic" email addressed to the public address, they can manually choose their From address from a drop down menu.

I use that feature a lot because I have two jobs and do some consulting work on the side, and all of the mail comes into one IMAP account.

With some smart configuring, you may find that it's not so enterprise-level after all. :wink:

Randall

jmihawkins
02-16-2008, 04:53 PM
I took a re-look at the the various HelpDesk offerings thru Fantastico, might add osTicket (http://osticket.com) to the list of possibles for free/cheap.