(Free) Collaborative e-mail - suggestions?

michalrz

Supreme [H]ardness
Joined
Jun 4, 2012
Messages
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Hello Hardforum!
I'm a long time lurker, for almost 7 years I've been visiting daily.
Finally came the day where I actually need to ask you guys and gals for help.

background
I work for a small (20 employees) local government instution in Poland which deals in social work, supporting the disabled, etc.
Currently, those employees who use e-mail have either thunderbird or outlook express installed. We have a cheap hosting package with 3 gigs space, a domain and <=10 IMAP ready e-mail accounts.
We don't (and can't) host anything ourselves because the cheaper internet packages we have to use don't allow providing services. And it would suck, because it's currently a 6/0,5 ADSL connection, soon to be 20/1. Business level DSL with a static IP is like 5 times more expensive. And we're VERY short on money anyway.

requirements, sort of
I'll cut to the chase and just say we need something like shared Outlook Express e-mail boxes (outgoing mail, incoming, trash, flagging, read/unread replied/unreplied indicators). So that worker A knows worker B received a mail and is on top of things :)
We'd also like to host locally, as this is an intranet type deal and for security/control/bandwidth conservation reasons we'd like to have that on a local server.
I'd like the solution to be either very cheap (not Sharepoint, Exchange, any of those) or free to use in business. I mean, we can hardly afford upgrading one PC every year.


What I've already tried:

I wanted to try Zimbra, but apparently it's best suited for installation on the server itself, with a domain pointing to it.
GroupOffice came very close to what I wanted, it even has authorization, granular permission control, shared calendar, shared files... Seems perfect, but apparently it only acts as a gateway to the hosted mail server.
Thus, deleting e-mails from the IMAP server (we go through about 2 gigs of mail a year and we are obliged to keep a lot of that handy) also removes them from GroupOffice.
There is a how-to (http://group-office.com/wiki/Use_POP3_on_a_remote_catch-all_mailbox_for_local_delivery) for creating some kind of local storage but I tried and couldn't get it to work, even with some of the developer's assistance - I had too many questions and noone to answer them...

Does anyone have any ideas he could share? Any clarifications I should make?
Thanks! :)
 
hosted exchange could be an option or no?

otherwise linux based solution you could host for free...

sounds like what you really need is something like kayako..... a CMS system...?
 
Couple thoughts...

1. Email is a "fire and forget" system.
2. Just because Worker A sent a message to Worker B, it doesn't mean that Worker B is actually aware of or working on whatever was in the message.
3. Are there any security requirements, such as protecting personally identifiable information?

Overall, I think email isn't what you need for proper management and running historical statistics/analysis. I suggest you look into a CRM (or another comprehensive software) package, as that allows for data organization, workflows and tracking, and other useful features.
 
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