

Ask HN: How to turn support emails into a searchable web site? - danecjensen

Hey HNers,<p>I want to build something like uservoice, getsatisfaction, desk.com, zendesk.com but works with regular email.  By this I mean the non-programming side of my startup spends a lot of time answering support emails.  I'd like to make a website of these emails that is searchable so our customers have a chance to search for their answer before sending an email.  I've decided already to use getmail to download the emails as either mbox or maildir.  Now I need a way to convert one of those formats into a static webpage.  I'm looking into pipermail and hypermail to do that but the results are so ugly I was wondering if there is something better out there.<p>Any ideas?
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dangrossman
Is your database of support mails really suitable for conversion to
knowledgebase articles? I would expect most, if not all of them, to have too
much conversational text and private customer information to publish online.

Why don't you have your support people create articles as they go? Whenever
they answer a ticket that might be helpful to other customers, they should
copy and paste the ticket into a KB article, rewriting the customer-specific
bits to be safe for public consumption.

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spking
Check out <http://helpjuice.com>, sounds very close to what you're looking
for.

