[ale] Email Tracking tool?

[Chris Ricker]

On Thu, 29 Apr 1999, Nomad the Wanderer wrote:

> 
>   Sorry,  Was trying to get the request out before a meeting.
> Here's the scenario:
> 
> A user hits a web page and hits the "contact us" button, which 
> generates an email to a list of support people.  The robot
> makes note of the email, date, and such.  when the Support people
> respond, the robot again notes the date, etc.  This continues.
> In the long run, this robot should be able to tell withing a given
> time span, how many incidents were opened, how many mails on average
> per incident,  howmany mails for a specific incident, the number of
> days for turn around, and similar stats.
> 

Ah, you want helpdesk software ;-).

I generally use Bugzilla (Mozilla's bug-tracking system, used by lots of
other free software groups now, including RedHat; see
http://www.mozilla.org/bugs/source.html) or JitterBug (the Samba team's
bug-tracking system, used by people as illustrious as Linus Torvalds before
he got "tired of mousing around"), but neither of those do the stats stuff
you're wanting.  It would be easy to add to either, and probably greatly
appreciated, as it would then make them more useful as all-around helpdesk
support apps instead of just bug-tracking apps.  Both are open-source.
Bugzilla is perl and MySQL, while jitterbug is C.

The king of helpdesk softwares is a product called Remedy.  It sounds like
you'd want their "Action Request System" and then maybe their "ARWeb"
product or whatever they're calling them this week.  Both are available in
various Unix flavors on the backend and client (probably just Solaris, AIX,
and PH-UX, though), as well as NT backend and Win/Mac clients and web
clients if you add on the ARWeb package.  You probably don't want this
unless you're at a big shop (it's kinda over-kill for most situations), but
if you are, this is definitely the stuff to buy.  See http://www.remedy.com/
.

I've been kinda interested in a package called the Ministry of Truth, as
I've heard good things, but I've not yet tried it myself.  See
http://tomato.nvgc.vt.edu/~hroberts/mot/ .

Beyond that, freshmeat should have lots of stuff, as that's the sort of
thing almost every ISP that's at all good uses.

later,
chris

--
Chris Ricker                                               kaboom at gatech.edu
                                                  chris.ricker at m.cc.utah.edu