How Do YOU Manage Emails For All Your Sites?

[SharifTK]

So you have a bunch of sites. Each with their own seperate addresses as far as contacting the Webmaster, or general contact for the website. How do you like to manage it? Or what is a efficient way? For example.

Your company name is: ABC Sites
The companys general info address: info@abcsites.com
The companys webmaster address: webmaster@abcsites.com

The you have a bunch of sites like:
Site 1
Site 2
Site DEF
Site XYZ

And these are all managed and owned completely by ABC Sites... do you have seperate addresses for each site... or do you point everything to ABC Sites adresses?

[AlexC]

Two methods:

On low volume sites, the email is done through a custom webmail / mail application on the server. The server reads in the emails from each mailbox, and then spits out a notification to me@abcsites.com / partner@abcsites.com (all staff, or if a department applies, all staff in that department).

When logged in to the webmail app, I can see the replies that have been sent, by who, any attachments and any notes. This currently seems to be the most effective method for my multi-admin sites.

Edit: works similar to a ticket system actually, thinking about it - but the client just sees it as regular email.

On my high volume site it goes straight to me, but i'm hoping to change that soon, as the newer system works a lot better.

Alex

[SharifTK]

See I thought about using custom emails for each different sites with webmail... but wouldn't that be wasting webspace too? Then again having each custom email setup on a local email client... if you have like 5 sites with 3 emails each, thats a lot of accounts in that client.

[AlexC]

Webspace is cheap, and outlook loads slower the more accounts I give it to handle, which is why I'm trying to switch where possible to a mainly web based solution

[SharifTK]

Well I'm using Thunderbird... it works pretty fast but it's getting on my nerves trying to manage 8 different accounts. Sure the organization is great, but not worth getting annoyed over.

[LiquidReflex]

I usually set up forwarding accounts and have them funneled into one or two main accounts (depending on the emails). For example, for those "webmaster" emails for technical stuff, you really don't need to have a separate email for each of those since most of them are just notices or problems (or spam). You may want to have each webmaster@ email to match the domain (webmaster@domain1.com, webmaster@domain2.com, etc) but then instead of creating a POP account for each, just assign them as forwading accounts to your main email address.

For ones I reply to a lot (like an e-commerce site), I will set up a dedicated account for that so the replies will come from that same account instead of something different. This still means I have a few email accounts, but I just store them all in Entourage and they all come into one inbox. Pretty easy to manage then.

[DigiDuke]

I make it pretty simple, and perhaps unprofessional...

I make webmaster the catchall address (catches all e-mail sent to addresses that don't exist), and forward it to my Gmail. When responding, I log in to the corresponding address.

I am currently programming a center webmaster administration panel for my website, where we can manage content, see statistics, communicate, vote on decisions, view and respond to mail and do all of that securely using a 256-bit SSL encryption. There I will be piping all e-mail to the administration panel allowing us to send e-mail from any address easily. It will be more professional than the current way, and allow us all to participate in responding to e-mails. I could also make that work for multiple sites by using domain forwarding, which is available if you have cPanel, and is probably possible manually too - I wouldn't know.

Sincerely,
Fred McJohn

[dreamscape]

OTRS

[SharifTK]

What is OTRS?

[dreamscape]

http://otrs.org/

[Bleys]

I use forwarding accounts and have them forward to my @section8networks.com addres... (which is an umbrella company that emcompasses my web properties--replying from this address for all sites usually avoids confusion). However, for high volume sites that generate a lot of correspondence, or have more than one person dealing with replying to emails... a custom solution or support desk software (like Kayako) is probably a good idea.

[DigiDuke]

Kaykao is unfortunately not free, but it's really high-quality. It's always been the support software of my dreams.

*sighs*

[fut]

Different users on Outlook Explorer.