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Vox Pop: Email via web CRM?

Most businesses and an increasing number of people (including me) are looking for friction-free ways for teams to deal with incoming public email accounts. Whether you're managing a home eBay company, fielding FAQs, or reviewing incoming resumes, it seems like there must be some good, lightweight web apps for teams to use and collaborate around.

Ron Richards just pointed me to Cerberus, and I've previously looked at DayLite, MailTank, and Sugar. I like the trouble-ticket approach in some ways, but I also wish it could be prettied up -- ideally including remote form submission from your own domains.

The Question to You:

Have you found a free or inexpensive web-based app that helps your teams manage incoming email and convert them into assigned tasks? Got one that’s great at template-based responses? Anything with the power of a support ticket app that’s a bit prettier from the user’s standpoint?

edit 2007-08-27 09:17:40: Shoulda mentioned: relevant self-links are okay on this one.

Ben Smith's picture

Sorry, me again. One...

Sorry, me again. One thing I forgot to mention. Heap has this fairly unknown but useful feature to categorize messages while your e-mailing them in. So for instance whenever we get a support issue we put:

[category: support issues]

in the e-mail body before we forward it in. This automatically places the email in that category (this is in addition to the auto association to a lead, opportunity, customer or archive). Of course you can change categories, so we have another category called "archived support issues." When someone is done with the issue we simply change categories on the message. I don't know how many of our customers do this, because you can create tasks/events by email as well and place them on the calendar; but we have personally found this works better if all you are doing is trying to find someone to respond to an email.

 
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