How do big companies use one email address?
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I've always been curious, how a big company manages a single email address. I.E. when you send email to support@microsoft.com surely there isn't one person there managing that single address, I understand how it *could* be done with some sort of intermediate email server perhaps and tags on the emails so they get to and from the correct person but is this software common or weird proprietary stuff?
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I've always been curious, how a big company manages a single email address. I.E. when you send email to support@microsoft.com surely there isn't one person there managing that single address, I understand how it *could* be done with some sort of intermediate email server perhaps and tags on the emails so they get to and from the correct person but is this software common or weird proprietary stuff?
I think most companies have a ticket concept. So the first time you mail them on an issue, a ticket is raised and assigned to an employee. All further mails from that person are handled by that one employee.
Regards, Nish
Nish’s thoughts on MFC, C++/CLI and .NET (my blog)
Currently working on C++/CLI in Action for Manning Publications. (*Sample chapter available online*) -
I've always been curious, how a big company manages a single email address. I.E. when you send email to support@microsoft.com surely there isn't one person there managing that single address, I understand how it *could* be done with some sort of intermediate email server perhaps and tags on the emails so they get to and from the correct person but is this software common or weird proprietary stuff?
Distribution lists. They can typically be set up in two ways. Add a bunch of people to a list & any emails to that address every one gets a copy of the list. Add a bunch of people to the list and round robin the recipient this way one person gets to handle the issue.
I'd love to help, but unfortunatley I have prior commitments monitoring the length of my grass. :Andrew Bleakley:
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I've always been curious, how a big company manages a single email address. I.E. when you send email to support@microsoft.com surely there isn't one person there managing that single address, I understand how it *could* be done with some sort of intermediate email server perhaps and tags on the emails so they get to and from the correct person but is this software common or weird proprietary stuff?
The business group I work with has a single email address that all 25 people have access to. One of the big reasons for doing this, is because very often more than 2 or 3 people are involved in working with a specific client or account. If one of them takes a day off or is on holiday, the others are there to ensure prompt handling of any email. While we don't use it, I'd be inclined to think that 'support@microsoft.com' invokes server rules to ensure a distribution of received mail takes place.
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I've always been curious, how a big company manages a single email address. I.E. when you send email to support@microsoft.com surely there isn't one person there managing that single address, I understand how it *could* be done with some sort of intermediate email server perhaps and tags on the emails so they get to and from the correct person but is this software common or weird proprietary stuff?
At one large company I worked at an email auto answering system was used. If it couldn't figure the email out automatically and and a response it routed it to the group that it thought was the closest match. I never worked with it directly, so I don't know the details, but I do know that it was a product that was purchased.
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I think most companies have a ticket concept. So the first time you mail them on an issue, a ticket is raised and assigned to an employee. All further mails from that person are handled by that one employee.
Regards, Nish
Nish’s thoughts on MFC, C++/CLI and .NET (my blog)
Currently working on C++/CLI in Action for Manning Publications. (*Sample chapter available online*)That's what I suspect, but I wonder what software they use, if it's proprietary or something from on the market, I've not found anything that is general purpose, only specificly tied into much larger apps. I thought maybe it was a more common place thing than it is apparently.
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That's what I suspect, but I wonder what software they use, if it's proprietary or something from on the market, I've not found anything that is general purpose, only specificly tied into much larger apps. I thought maybe it was a more common place thing than it is apparently.
We use FogBugz for this. It is actually tied to a form not an email address to report the initial bug, but I believe you can tie it to an incoming email address for that as well. Each enquiry becomes a "bug", and go into the "bug" pile, sub pile "support". Then anyone can shift through them, and all emails to and from are attached to the "bug" so we have a history of what happened. There must be other software tools for the job, but this seems quite small and stand alone, and I personally find it very easy to use.
zen is the art of being at one with the two'ness
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That's what I suspect, but I wonder what software they use, if it's proprietary or something from on the market, I've not found anything that is general purpose, only specificly tied into much larger apps. I thought maybe it was a more common place thing than it is apparently.
TicketSmith[^]... It is older, but it works well. It works by setting up a email forwarder into the entry script. You can also do things like customize the script so that it ignores emails that have a spam level (a'la SpamAssassin) that is too high. There is also the mantis bug tracking system[^], but I think it only allows form-based entry. Peace!
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We use FogBugz for this. It is actually tied to a form not an email address to report the initial bug, but I believe you can tie it to an incoming email address for that as well. Each enquiry becomes a "bug", and go into the "bug" pile, sub pile "support". Then anyone can shift through them, and all emails to and from are attached to the "bug" so we have a history of what happened. There must be other software tools for the job, but this seems quite small and stand alone, and I personally find it very easy to use.
zen is the art of being at one with the two'ness
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Odd. So far it works very well for us. If I may ask, what problems or limitations are you running into? If I am about to discover some problem in 6 months time it might be good to see it coming :)
zen is the art of being at one with the two'ness
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I've always been curious, how a big company manages a single email address. I.E. when you send email to support@microsoft.com surely there isn't one person there managing that single address, I understand how it *could* be done with some sort of intermediate email server perhaps and tags on the emails so they get to and from the correct person but is this software common or weird proprietary stuff?
John Cardinal wrote:
when you send email to support@microsoft.com surely there isn't one person there managing that single address
Actually there is and coincidentally her name is Shirley :-D
led mike
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Odd. So far it works very well for us. If I may ask, what problems or limitations are you running into? If I am about to discover some problem in 6 months time it might be good to see it coming :)
zen is the art of being at one with the two'ness
No real problems, maybe just an assumption, I consider it more for tracking bugs than doing general day to day support. 90% of our support emails are not bug related, they are simply people not reading the manual or having pre-sales technical questions etc. Our FogBugz is only used internally as a bug and new feature tracking database that we can prioritize. Most of our support goes on in our support forum, but quite a bit of support is still direct email for confidentiality or the user just doesn't want to post publicly their issue. What I'd like to do is have our main support email go into a pool where people can take an email and it's there's from that point on. They take a new incoming email, reply to it and the rest of the email conversation is back and forth with that person who originally took charge of it.
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No real problems, maybe just an assumption, I consider it more for tracking bugs than doing general day to day support. 90% of our support emails are not bug related, they are simply people not reading the manual or having pre-sales technical questions etc. Our FogBugz is only used internally as a bug and new feature tracking database that we can prioritize. Most of our support goes on in our support forum, but quite a bit of support is still direct email for confidentiality or the user just doesn't want to post publicly their issue. What I'd like to do is have our main support email go into a pool where people can take an email and it's there's from that point on. They take a new incoming email, reply to it and the rest of the email conversation is back and forth with that person who originally took charge of it.
Interesting, since we are in virtually the same position. Most support is handled via our forum, but some is handled via email. All of the support emails go through FogBugz. FogBugz has 2 projects that I can see. Development - all bugs for the developers to work on, and any confirmed bugs that come in via support go into here. Support - all customer emails end up in here. So when doing support time I just go to FogBugz and call up all open bugs in the Support project and work through them, just as I work through the forum questions. When I do programming I simply call up the development project. Since support "bugs" can be assigned to a specific person this does what you say you want, at least from my perspective :) On a related front I know what you mean about regular questions. Using firefox I am now totally reliant on this extension: http://cfavatar.com/com/cfavatar/_personal/index.cfm I type in a trigger "phrase" (normally 3 or 4 letters), hit the key combo, and up pops a standard reply :-D combined with an ever growing FAQ section this works really quite well for me.
zen is the art of being at one with the two'ness
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John Cardinal wrote:
when you send email to support@microsoft.com surely there isn't one person there managing that single address
Actually there is and coincidentally her name is Shirley :-D
led mike
Shirley you must be joking.
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I've always been curious, how a big company manages a single email address. I.E. when you send email to support@microsoft.com surely there isn't one person there managing that single address, I understand how it *could* be done with some sort of intermediate email server perhaps and tags on the emails so they get to and from the correct person but is this software common or weird proprietary stuff?
I know that our support group uses Contactual[^] for this very purpose.
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I've always been curious, how a big company manages a single email address. I.E. when you send email to support@microsoft.com surely there isn't one person there managing that single address, I understand how it *could* be done with some sort of intermediate email server perhaps and tags on the emails so they get to and from the correct person but is this software common or weird proprietary stuff?
It's called an email group.
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It's called an email group.
Hmm..I don't think so, several people misinterpreted what I was asking about, or didn't follow it through to how it would actually need to work, I'm not talking about distributing email to multiple people, I'm talking about multiple people being able to "take" emails as they come in and forever be associated with that particular "thread" of emails back and forth as in one support account but when a support person takes it they deal directly with it back and forth until it's resolved but all the while using one single email address, i.e. support@microsoft.com
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Hmm..I don't think so, several people misinterpreted what I was asking about, or didn't follow it through to how it would actually need to work, I'm not talking about distributing email to multiple people, I'm talking about multiple people being able to "take" emails as they come in and forever be associated with that particular "thread" of emails back and forth as in one support account but when a support person takes it they deal directly with it back and forth until it's resolved but all the while using one single email address, i.e. support@microsoft.com
Mail groups and then a program like Rational Clear Context actually parses and distributes the email. We used it at Micron for exactly that function. It worked beautifully.