IMAP, email clients and synchronization of emails between a team group… Ticket system?

Question

This question deals with teamwork and emails. I'm facing the following scenario.

I have inquiries and other important mail sent to a shared email address. All 4 team meambers have full access to this email. I'm using a googlemail to manage that email address.

There's a huge load of emails coming to that inbox: inquiries, orders, requests... The team has to deal with messages, reply and take actions accordingly. However the problem is... ok while I can use IMAP to let each member have their email clients synchronized (Android, Apple Mail, Thunderbird...), how to alert other members in the group? Specifically, how to make aware the rest of the team members when one of the team members has answered to a message? And also, even if one of the members does not answers... but only reads an incoming new message, the message will be marked as read and other members could not notice it.

So the question is... how to synchronize teamwork in a way everyone is informed of other people actions in regards of receiving/sending email? This could work with CC/BCC but I do not really wish to do that, seems more confusing.

Are there any solutions (possibly free/open) for this situation? I'd wish to use googlemail as email provider in any case and people should be able to check everything both from web, desktop clients and mobile clients. Perhaps this could be addressed with a ticket system... Any advices?

thanks!

---

[This might not be a programming related question but I'm not sure which stackexchange site should I use. If some mod thinks it's unappropriate to post here, please direct me to the appropriate site and then delete the question. Thanks ]

Answer 1

Please consider using OTRS for this: you can use it to simply process all your incoming emails, distribute it among your team members, and you can use answer templates to be even more productive. You can monitor completion of tasks by using escalations and you could use statistics to see how much requests you get on a topic/over a certain timeframe etc.

There is a free as in libre version that you can install on your own server and you can use otrsondemand.com if you want the very same software but then as SaaS. There are commercial offerings available to help you with setup, design and support if you're into that, as well.a

Answer 2

Eventually I choose to use Google Groups within my Google apps for my team.

I created one group where people external to Google can write to. Everyone in my team gets notified of the ongoing discussions with other people as long as we use this group to communicate.

It might not be an ideal solution for a large team with departments and such but for a small business it's a practical solution.

I won't mark my answer as the best answer to my question, but I'm leaving this to others in case they run in my same scenario.