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Ask HN: How to handle emails from customers?

9 points by jakobegger ↗ HN
I'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).

Right now I use OmniOutliner to keep a list of requests, and manually add names of people who requested it.

Can you think of a more streamlined solution?

I'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.

I've looked at CRMs, but they seem to be focused only on sales.

Is there a tool that will help me stay in contact with customers even when I'm not trying to sell them something?

6 comments

[ 5.7 ms ] story [ 22.8 ms ] thread
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!
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