

Ask HN: How to handle emails from customers? - jakobegger

I&#x27;m an independent software developer. Most of the emails I get are feature requests. When I implement a new feature, I will search my email archive and contact everybody who asked for it (sometimes months after they contacted me).<p>Right now I use OmniOutliner to keep a list of requests, and manually add names of people who requested it.<p>Can you think of a more streamlined solution?<p>I&#x27;ve looked at issue trackers, but most of them are horrible to use and often require people to sign up on a website rather than just sending an email.<p>I&#x27;ve looked at CRMs, but they seem to be focused only on sales.<p>Is there a tool that will help me stay in contact with customers even when I&#x27;m not trying to sell them something?
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flarg
"Is there a tool that will help me stay in contact with customers even when
I'm not trying to sell them something?"

For something email-based, that does not require your users to signup for
something, and helps you manage feature and support requests, I can't
recommend FogBugz highly enough.

That being said, I am sure you will still need to do some manual copying of
email addresses to the primary ticket for a feature --- I don't think there is
a tool out there that will do this for you without user sign-up (e.g. User
Voice).

I've deployed FogBugz for a small IT firm with a large IT-phobic user base -
and it works very well; and it comes with wikis, discussions groups, and other
features.

Also, for a 1-2 developers, it's free.

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acafourek
My team has been using Freshdesk for about a year and it is killer. By
default, your user creates an account to view tickets and communicate, but it
is also highly customizable- we've changed all the settings so the users
experience is entirely via email (so they never have to create a Freshdesk
account) but they get automatic replies to let them know that we've received
their email and a ticket has been created. It's also free for up to 3 users
which is a heck of a deal.

~~~
dotnetkow
+1 for Freshdesk. Another indie developer here - works very well as support
for my apps!

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twunde
I believe most issue trackers will allow you to create tickets through email,
so a low-tech solution may be to simply forward tickets to the appropriate
email address, possibly with a some specific meta-data attached

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NameNickHN
I know a couple of software and hosting companies that use
[http://osticket.com/](http://osticket.com/)

