I didn’t see any reason to pay for it when there are other perfectly fine solutions out there for free, so I switched to osticket, which is just as good, probably better actually, than Maian.

Those who say you shouldn’t use a ticket system must not be doing much business online, or they would get it. How are you supposed to answer emails in a timely way when you have 1000s of spam messages to wade through?

Rufina

I can completely relate to the spam problem, but I wouldn’t agree that the support ticket solution is the only or best one.

I have had up to 50 prominent sites at once and my email address was everywhere for a time. But I couldn’t give mine up…it’s the same one I’ve had for 10 years and it’s myfirstname@myfullname.com, so I had to come up with a different solution.

First, I changed the email address on all my sites to graphics instead of text.

Then, I outsourced my domain-based email to Google Apps, which is a free solution with far-and-away the best spam filtering I’ve ever seen. I had wrestled with all kinds of spam filters and found them all unwieldy and lacking in flexibility. If you use domain-based email (as opposed to a gmail or yahoo mail account), you may want to check it out here:

http://braindump.chuckbrown.com/stuff-i-recommend/cool-email-solution-google-apps/

@ Josh,

Yeah, you may not be rich and famous yet…but you’re far closer than you were a few days ago!

Today, web owners can’t get by for long without support tickets.

If you have several websites with your email address on them or publish articles with email addresses on them, over time you will be receiving 10,000-20,000 spam emails a day into your email box, like I was. Try sorting out the legitimate emails from the spam when you have 15 -25 email accounts all getting upwards of 10,000 pieces of spam a day! Try even keeping up with deleting all that crap! Its insanity!

Ultimately, I shut down the email accounts and opened new ones connected only with the support ticket. What a lifesaver! Now, the only mail I get is real support mail and I’ve saved myself several hours per day.

So my suggestion is to set up a support ticket system as soon as you set up your site and don’t give email address out in your resource box – just send people to the support ticket page. I use one with a capsha to insure no spammers get in.

Rufina James

@ Amanda – You have a point. It probably wouldn’t be ideal for non-IM niche sites. I don’t use it for my niche sites that are not IM related. I get very little feedback from those sites anyway.

I’m far from rich and famous

However, I don’t think a lot of people understand online ticket systems or how they work. I had no idea what they were until I got into internet marketing. I think if you work in niches outside IM there will be some level of education involved with explaining to customers how it all works.

I’ll definitely be setting one up though once I’m rich and famous like Josh.

I’ve been using the Maian Support system on my site for a while and I’ve always found it reliable and quite customisable too.

I searched around a fair bit when first considering my choice of system but found there wasnt much that was out there that wasn’t either a. overpriced / b. didn’t offer everything I wanted.

Maian isn’t publicised as much as it should be, it’s definately handly and I find there’s definate benefits to using a ticket system as you can really cut out unnecessary correspondence with a customer that often happens with email – along with the usual deliverability worries.