Joel on Software

2001/05/03

Ev has a neat idea for an application that he calls Alias Manager. It's a simple way to deal with having a team of people who are responsible for answering emails to one email alias, like the world famous president@whitehouse.gov, or the almost as famous customer-support@fogcreek.com. When I read his idea, I thought, smart Ev! We need that too!

Then I realized that FogBUGZ almost does it, but not quite. It would take about $10,000 of investment to add this feature to FogBUGZ. So I thought I'd ask my readers two questions:

• have you seen a simple, cheap application that does this?
• do you need a simple, cheap application that does this?

Postscript: I've gotten tons of replies. There are a lot of expensive CRM packages. That's not what I'm talking about, they are too complicated and too expensive for small business. There are also some open source things, many people mentioned rt.

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You’re reading Joel on Software, stuffed with years and years of completely raving mad articles about software development, managing software teams, designing user interfaces, running successful software companies, and rubber duckies.

About the author.

I’m Joel Spolsky, founder of Fog Creek Software, a New York company that proves that you can treat programmers well and still be highly profitable. Programmers get private offices, free lunch, and work 40 hours a week. Customers only pay for software if they’re delighted. We make FogBugz, an enlightened project management system designed to help great teams develop brilliant software, and Fog Creek Copilot, which makes remote desktop access easy.