directions
To answer your questions, e-mail polling is one of the features that osticket support.
As mentioned in an earlier post made today, I have been using ostickets since July 2009, and today marks a milestone of closing 3000 tickets. Our linux box has a cron job that runs every minute, however it only checks the email every 2 - 3 minutes.
Auto-cron lets users who don't have access to the crontab "semi" automatically poll the email, but only if people are logged in. This is not a bug, but the way it has been designed (since not all web hosts permit access to the crontab).
However, if you have access to the crontab, or similar task scheduler, then you don't want to auto-cron feature enabled. Instead, you want to enable the "Enable POP/IMAP email fetch" option.
osticket and the mail server can be installed on the same machine, but I've had my issues running osticket on windows so I highly recommend using the LAMP stack (although someone has recommended using Zend).
