Set up support email properly

[Changaco]

Right now I'm the only one who has access to it, and it's just a normal email account on my personal server. We need something more secure that also allows me to delegate support to others. Gratipay uses Freshdesk, and it looks like the service is free for up to 3 agents, but of course it's not open source. Should we sign up anyway for now, or can we make our own thing with free software in a reasonable amount of time?

[Zatalyz]

Une solution simple consiste à avoir l'adresse de support accessible via IMAP, et que ceux qui peuvent faire le support aient le couple login/mot de passe pour y accéder ; ensuite il suffit de configurer son client de messagerie. Côté sécu ça veut dire que tout les autorisés ont les mêmes pouvoirs sur cette boîte ; si quelqu'un fait une bêtise, on ne saura pas qui, mais vu notre nombre, ça devrait aller ?

Sinon, pour des alternatives libres à Freshdesk :
http:https://alternativeto.net/software/freshdesk/?license=opensource

Certains sont avant tout des systèmes de tickets, ça fait un peu doublon avec ici, sauf que c'est pas public.

https://getbrimir.com/ a l'air intéressant, c'est du ruby on rail, visiblement on peut paramétrer pour gérer les mails envoyés par les utilisateurs, qui sont transformés en tickets.

https://helpy.io/ (ruby aussi) a l'air encore plus complet, il propose aussi des fonctions de forum, faq, etc. Ce serait sans doute le premier à tester ?

[Changaco]

Related blog post: Securing Customer Support.

[Changaco]

We've received our first email to support written in a language that I don't speak (German).

[aggsol]

@Changaco I can help with that email. Might be a sign that the German translation is lacking.

[Changaco]

@aggsol Google isn't good at translating German, but I understand the gist of the message. The problem appears to be liberapay/liberapay.com#659, not the German translation. I'll send you a copy of the message with my answer in English, so you can check that I didn't misunderstand, and possibly translate the response.

[Changaco]

I'm wary of hosting the support system ourselves, so I've looked at Freshdesk and Helpy. We currently can't afford even their cheapest standard paid plans, but they both have free plans.

Helpy is open source and has i18n by default so I decided to try it first. It's not bad, but it has UX issues, and I haven't been able to make the outgoing SMTP work the way I wanted.

Freshdesk is much more polished but not open source. The free plan doesn't include the "multi-language" feature, but we don't really need it because it's only about the customer portal. We can tag and route a message based on its language, I've already configured that for English and French.

So I propose using Freshdesk. Any comments or objections?

[revi]

Looks good. :+1:

[mattbk]

I'm used to FD, so I guess that's a +1? Although not familiar with the free plan, but I'll go look now.

[mattbk]

Looks fine. Not sure what basic/advanced social channel is.

[Changaco]

We can tag and route a message based on its language

Actually it's the "requester language", and that doesn't work as well as I'd hoped. I've sent a few test messages and they all ended up in the English group unless I sent them specifically to the [email protected] address.

It's possible that language detection is part of the i18n features which aren't available in the free plan. Or maybe it just doesn't work at all.

Fortunately having fully accurate routing is not a hard requirement considering the low volume of support requests we currently receive.

[Changaco]

DKIM is still not working. I added the DNS entries Freshdesk asked for, so I don't know what's wrong.

[davidak]

Have you looked at https://zammad.org/?

It is open source and want's to be intuitive. I havn't tested it.

[jorgesumle]

I can speak Spanish and German (B2 level) and I check my email every day, so if you receive a message in any of those languages just ping me, I'm happy to help.

[MartinDelille]

@Changaco You can add me on freshdesk agent if you want. I speak French, English, Spanish and German so I could be some help!

[kindlyfire]

You can add me as well, if there is still place in the free plan. I speak English, French and Dutch.

[MartinDelille]

@kindlyfire There is no agent limitation in the free plan. Only feature limitation.

[Changaco]

I've finally figured out why DKIM wasn't working: I forgot to tell Cloudflare not to "proxy" the special subdomains. I'm not sure why it didn't do that automatically like it does in some other cases.

Anyway, we should be able to start using Freshdesk now. Better late than never…

[Changaco]

We received an automatic email from Cloudflare informing us that a certificate has been issued for fddkim.liberapay.com. I don't know why Freshdesk would need a certificate for that subdomain, and it's a possible security vulnerability, so I've removed the subdomain. I never made the switch to Freshdesk anyway.