Best tools and practices for managing, fielding and filing clients' support emails?

Hi All,

We offer support for our web services via email. At present the support guys just use Outlooks' flags and priority support to manage the emails and move them between folders to represent various stages of the support process. As you can imagine this technique is far from perfect.

I was wondering if there are any good alternatives, third party tools or plug-ins. Something that can automatically assign and recognize case numbers would be great. It would also be useful to have the ability to log and track support requests and generate service statistics/metrics.

What do you use in your companies/projects to manage you client support departments? What works best?

Many thanks. T.

From stackoverflow

• use http://www.fogcreek.com/FogBugz/

  FogBugz lets your team collaboratively handle a public email address (e.g., support@example.com). When an email message comes in, FogBugz AutoSort automatically discards spam, and sorts the real messages into different areas, based on your training. Anyone on the team can see the entire history of each email conversation with a given customer, so they can send a well-informed reply. The customer gets an automatic email reply with a URL they can click to check the status of their inquiry.

  When a customer reports a bug, it can be assigned straight to a developer to fix, and it will be tracked just like any other bug.

  Customer Email Link