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Buried in E-mail?
Is your team's inbox out of control? Meet Cerberus Helpdesk. He doesn't eat, he doesn't sleep, and he never needs a vacation. His interests include: burying spam, fetching useful information, and herding wild e-mail.
Latest Version
4.0 Build 662 (Stable)
QA tested on July 16 2008
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18,979+ Companies are Taking Control of their Inbox with Cerberus Helpdesk!
"When ThinkGeek started using Cerberus we soon realized how much wasted time we had spent dealing with conventional email clients. We became so efficient with our email customer relations using Cerberus that we started to get more work done elsewhere in the organization. No kidding! It's so easy to setup, maintain and use that we simply cannot imagine what life was like pre-cerberus. This isn't a TV Commercial, Cerberus works!"
- Willie, ThinkGeek
Is Your Current E-mail Application More Cluttered Than Your Inbox?

Cerberus Helpdesk 4.0 (Cerb4) is a group-based webmail project that has been evolving since January 2002. We started the project because we couldn't find an existing PHP-based solution that seemed to be conscious enough about performance and usability. We didn't have a spectacularly large volume of e-mail to deal with at the time, but that only made it more surprising that the available solutions were failing us as badly as they were.

It has taken us six years of immersion, and tens of thousands of conversations, to really appreciate how much energy it takes to find elegant solutions -- concepts that are simple to explain, but remain flexible enough to be used in creatively unexpected ways.

What you see in the project today is a distillation of these elegant solutions from our six years of experimentation. If you're accustomed to complexity as a measure of software's maturity, things may look too simple at first glance. Don't let the simplicity fool you.

Elegant solutions look simple in hindsight.

You only need to understand a few concepts to get started:

  • A ticket is a specific e-mail conversation and all the related data about a question or issue. Each ticket has a unique identifier for future reference by anyone involved.

  • The people on the originating end of tickets are called requesters. A ticket can have multiple requesters.

  • The people on the answering end of tickets are called workers.

  • A watcher is a worker who receives copies of messages. For example, a supervisor may be a watcher to monitor the quality of the messages workers are writing back to requesters.

  • The helpdesk is a software hub for centrally managing and archiving tickets, and routing messages between workers and requesters. This allows several workers to receive and share e-mail without requesters writing to any of them individually.

  • A bucket is a container for storing similar tickets. Common buckets are: Leads, Receipts, Newsletters, Refunds and Spam.

  • A group is several workers who share responsibility for the same tickets and buckets. Common groups are: Sales, Support, Development, Billing and Corporate. These examples are departments, but groups can be related by anything.

  • A worker in a group is called a member. A member with the authority to modify the group is called a manager. Groups can have any number of managers.

  • Each group has an inbox where new tickets are delivered by default. These tickets are then moved into buckets either automatically by the helpdesk or by workers.

Ready for some examples? Start with the screenshot tour.
Pile Sorting breaks down large lists of e-mail into actionable piles based on sender, domain, subject pattern or headers.
About WebGroup Media, LLC.
WebGroup Media, LLC. (WGM) has been collaborating on Cerberus Helpdesk for over six years. We're lean, profitable, organically-bootstrapped, and carry no long-term debt or outside funding. There are currently six of us running things full-time: Jeff (Chief of R&D), Brenan (Community Liaison), Darren (Operations), Dan (R&D), Mike (R&D) and Joe (QA). We also work with many contributors from the user community. We all come from technological and academic backgrounds, and we leverage technology as much as possible in the day-to-day running of our company.

We're unconventionally structured; everyone here is involved with using, promoting, and supporting our projects. This keeps us oriented as users first and as a business second.

Our software has to become an extra, superhuman team member, since we humans have various other jobs to do in addition to responding to e-mail, chat, forums, and phone calls. It's worth the trade-off, as those other jobs -- sales, coding, design, biz, docs -- are very well-informed by our conversations with customers. We can't imagine having walls set up between the real world and our decision makers.

As the project has grown, we've had an interesting arms-race between Cerberus Helpdesk and the ever-increasing number of people who write in to talk to us about it. This is our muse.
Cerb4 Blog

Cerberus Helpdesk™ is © Copyright 2002-2008 by WebGroup Media LLC.
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