Because of a client request I've been looking for an email functionality that personally I haven't seen; if someone has an idea on how to accomplish this without having to program it's own software to do this, please let me know. The situation is the following:

It's a store that uses emails to receive quotes requests, now they have a sales email account for this that all sales persons have access to. What they want to do is when the email has been received by one of the salespersons to let it inform the rest of the sales people that the first salesperson to respond has been the person who took the quote responsibility.

In other words is like a public email account inside the company that the users can take ownership of the emails received stamping them with a signature that will identify the person who took control of it.

If anyone has an idea on how to tackle this without having to do a custom system please let me know thank you.

You could use procmail. Basically when a person downloads a message, procmail can insert a mail header or even text into the message, (i.e. their name or ID) then send a copy on to another address. So you could have Jim download a message from quotes@domain.com which gets copied to the address "assigned.quotes@domain.com" containing the text, "assigned to Jim".

Anything more "out of the box" will probably cost money.

Alternatively, have all incoming mail to "sales@domain.com" sent to the trac program. Then the staff can choose to accept the entries from there, and the ownership is recorded.

There are several application suites that accept email and create "incident reports" "help requests" "work orders" or similar. My favorite is Request Tracker. (I don't know anything about the Trac application mentioned.)

Messages get entered into the application [a database]. Keywords trigger sending email notices or announcements to specified people. People interact with the application to move things through a work flow. As things change in the application, other notices happen. Reports are available.

This might be exactly the sort of thing you are looking for.

~~~ 0;-Dan

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It all seems plausible; but knowing my client a ticketing system will be an overkill.

Basically what happens is that they posses a Fax Server in the company where they receive the quotes requests and the fax server permits to respond where a signature is applied once the response has been sent from the client applications. So what their interested is to implement the same paradigm for emails.

Ticketing systems will add a level of complexity to the simple act of taking ownership of an email, which they will not accept into their workflow. I really wish to find something that could do that as I do not think that they will pay for the custom development work.

Thanks again, please if you have anything to add do so.

forward the email to themselves, most email clients will show a "was forwarded on xxx @ yyy to zzz@foo.bar

Depends what software they are using to check the emails currently.