In order to more effectively manage problems that arise at Sabrienix, I started looking for a ticketing system. We’re not a big enough operation yet to warrant spending the money on something like Kayako (even though I think we could use it, my wife gave me “that look” when I showed her the pricing options) so I was looking for something that’s free and doesn’t suck.
Let me tell you, it’s like trying to find a needle in a haystack. RT looks good, but I found it somewhat broken on FreeBSD. I’ve spent much of my time lately doing PHP, so I figured something written in PHP would be nice. Unfortunately, PHP makes it easy for anyone to be a programmer so you’ve got a lot of really terrible software that goes along with it. After going through many, many projects and checking the vulnerability history of each, I finally came across Eventum. It’s MySQL AB’s open source issue tracking system, and I think it rocks.
Anyway, in the course of setting it up, I learned that two of the email addresses for Sabrienix had been being ignored. Why? I checked those by POP3 over SSL, and Thunderbird didn’t agree with the server about the ins and outs of SSL so it decided just to silently give up. I was able to check support just fine, because it goes through a mailing list – but I’d been ignoring sales emails for about a week now, and that looks terrible.
Who’s dumbass idea was it for that behaviour? Not just when it automatically checks, no – even if you click “check email” it will still silently skip over any connections it can’t negotiate SSL with. Nothing in error console. Of course I’ve rectified the situation and made arrangements to ensure it can’t happen again (our ticketing system sends me an SMS if I take too long to acknowledge a new request), but needless to say I’m just the tiniest bit irritated at Thunderbird.