I am evaluating the osTicket software to replace our old perldesk, and I really like the nice simple design/feel of osTicket.

However, I have a few questions:

1. From what I can see... if customer opens a ticket by sending in an email... the ticket is opened, but customer is not able to reply to the staff responses by email? The only way for customer to update an open ticket is to login to the web area and submit their response? The customer can not submit a new response by simply replying to the email notification?

Am I missing something?

We have customers who use blackberry and other devices like that. When they receive a notification that staff has replied to their ticket.. how can they update their ticket if they can't login? I must be crazy, but I just can't see how to configure osTicket to allow a customer to update their ticket by sending an email reply to a message notification. This seems like a pretty basic requirement for any helpdesk system, no?

2. There does not seem to be any status except open and closed.

How do we know if a ticket is open, but staff is working on it? (ie: Sometimes a ticket stays open, but staff needs to do something that might take a while. Or where staff has replied, but we need to wait for customer to verify resolution before closing the ticket. How can we identify these kinds of situations?)

Or is there an area where we can add additional status options to the software?

It would be ideal to have:

Open (new/re-opened) -- this is new ticket where no response has been made yet.

Open (assigned to staff) -- this is ticket where staff needs to do something.

Open (waiting on customer) -- this is ticket where staff has fixed problem and we wait for customer to verify.

Closed

3. How does the customer login to their "account" if they don't have an old ticket number?

4. What if the customer changes their email address? Does this mean they lose all their previous helpdesk tickets since they can't login any more with the old email? I don't see any mention of "usernames" anywhere... so how does the helpdesk associate tickets with users? I hope it's not only by email address?

5. Is there an auto-close function? For example, if ticket status is "Open (waiting on customer)", then after x number of days the ticket should be auto-closed.