Launching today
ServiceBeard
Sync your mailbox with your issue tracker
57 followers
Sync your mailbox with your issue tracker
57 followers
Turn your customer-facing mailbox into an issue board. ServiceBeard syncs your emails directly to your issue tracker, letting you run a full service desk from your existing workspace. You can leverage the automation pipelines you’ve already set up without investing in expensive, per-seat helpdesk software. It's open-source, connects via standard IMAP/SMTP, and currently supports GitHub, GitLab, and Linear.
ServiceBeard
👋 Hi Product Hunt,
I'm Joram, the solo developer who built ServiceBeard.
My team was managing a shared mailbox by using coloured labels and read/unread statuses just to track who had replied to an email. Not ideal. Of course, this problem has been solved by proprietary service desk tools, but those often come with steep pricing models and heavy onboarding. That's why I built ServiceBeard.
It caters to teams who either can't or don't want to invest in yet another tool, or who prefer not to run commercial, proprietary software. It's fully functional with no limits or feature caps in the self-hosted version, and there is a managed cloud version that anyone can try for free.
I'm looking for honest, early feedback: is this something you'd use? What could be improved, and what features should be added? I'd love to hear your thoughts!
the "we manage a shared mailbox with color labels because zendesk feels overkill" problem is exactly where 90% of small teams live and none of the enterprise tools acknowledge exists.
real q: does the mailbox-to-issue mapping keep both threaded? asking because most sync tools drop the email thread after the first ticket creation and then agents context-switch between two tabs to reconstruct the conversation history.
ServiceBeard
@thenameisarian ServiceBeard will try its best to keep conversations threaded in both mailbox and issue tracker, and I'm using layered strategies to detect the conversation a message should be part of: by In-Reply-To, then References, then subject+sender. Great question!
How does it handle email threads where multiple customers are CC'd, do those get split out into separate tickets automatically or linked together somehow?
ServiceBeard
@tunahan7j2k Interesting edge case. ServiceBeard will create a single conversation and a single issue from this incoming email, it doesn't use CC'd addresses to create additional tickets or links at the moment. How would you expect or want this to work?
syncing mailbox to issue tracker isn't new (Zendesk, Front, even Gmail+Zapier have done this for years), so the pitch really comes down to how clean the two-way sync stays once a thread gets messy - CC'd people, forwarded emails, someone replying from a different address. that's usually where these integrations start creating duplicate or orphaned tickets
ServiceBeard
@omri_ben_shoham1 Tested some of these scenario's, but not in an as structured way as I'd like. I'm going to to put more (automated) testing towards this. Thanks for raising this!
Finally a helpdesk tool that doesn't force per-seat pricing. Hooked it up to my Linear board over IMAP and had tickets flowing in within minutes, no need to migrate my whole team's setup.
Finally something that doesn't force me to drag my team onto yet another per-seat subscription. Synced our shared inbox to Linear in a few minutes, and the IMAP setup was straightforward enough that I didn't need to bother our admin.
The framing of "we were managing a shared mailbox with colored labels" is a more honest starting point than most tools admit to haha