HelpSpot is exactly what you're after - http://www.userscape.com/products/helpspot/

We've been using it for about 3 years and love it.

Although I haven't used it myself (though I'm planning to once I need to deal with such issues) I hear Fogbugz is pretty good at this kind of stuff.

Yea, this is one of the main reasons I use FogBugz. It checks email via POP and then imports emails as cases. You can handle the case just like another case/ticket/bug. You can reply right from the website, or assign it to a project, user, etc...

They have a free startup plan for two users, and free unlimited users for yc funded startups.

FogBugz rocks. I've been using it for almost three years - the last year using the Fog Creek hosted version - and I couldn't be happier.

As mentioned, you can give it POP access to your support account and it will auto-respond to your customers (optionally) and also create a new "case" for you to track the issue. It makes it dead simple to follow a thread all the way through until it's resolved.

You can also see the history of previous cases opened by the same person which can be very helpful. FogBugz also includes a wiki to help share information internally, the same forum software that runs the BoS forums over on Joel's site, and some pretty cool project mgmt features that I personally don't use, but could see the value in if I had a bigger team.

I know not everyone drinks the Joel Kool-aid, but FogBugz is pretty slick. I'd say it's worth checking out, especially if you quality for their free plan for students/startups. http://www.fogcreek.com/FogBugz/StudentAndStartup.html

http://www.redmine.org is Ruby on Rails -based project management app. You can configure it to run your code development projects (it basically an improvement on http://trac.edgewall.org, features wiki/tickets/milestones/integration with git/svn... etc ) and set up a separate customer support section.

They have email gateway and a very flexible user rights management features. You could set up customers to email you issues which will automatically become tickets in your development project (which is accessible only for developers). You can also set up a wiki available only for customers.

Since you are (hopefully) already running issue tracker/version control environment for developers, you can thus avoid creating a redundant extra layer of 'support ticket' database and 'customer knowledge base' altogether.

Check out Roundup (http://roundup.sourceforge.net/). Written in Python, easy to extend, has a web interface and email gateway. The UI is pretty ugly, sadly, so if you want something easier on the eyes, you need to hack up some custom CSS.

Yes, I'd recommend Roundup. It has a good, easy, clean design.

Pretty sweet and easy to get this working in a Rails app http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/HowToReceiveEmailsWi... Then users in the rails app can claim feedback, and reply through the system, so everything gets nice and logged. I'm not sure what your development platform looks like but you should be able to wire this type of thing up somehow.

I haven't used any but check out these recommendations: http://ask.metafilter.com/44577/FreewareOpen-Source-Help-Des...

There's also a whole list here: http://www.opensourcehelpdesklist.com/

Are you hosting this yourself or do you want someone else to host it?

Zendesk: http://www.zendesk.com

Not sure if it's the right fit for you, but it's run by some friends of mine.

What about something like GetSatisfaction? It's all web based and comunity driven. You don't have private areas (I think) but it does look nice and I think you can even tie your FAQ page to it.

I tried it and I didn't like it. I appreciate what they are trying to do, but I am not looking to redesign my workflow around getsatisfaction but rather optimize my exisitng worflow (currently around gmail).

OTRS: http://otrs.org/ or RT: http://bestpractical.com/rt/

Zendesk is nice, but maybe a bit expensive for what you need (it was for me).

I use Cerberus myself. Once you figure out its quirks, it's pretty handy.

Recommend Kayako - http://www.kayako.com

Very robust and full of features.

anyone use http://sproutit.com/ ?

Cerberus. It kicks ass. I used it at two of my internships...quality software.

http://www.cerberusweb.com/

It's super-easy to use, too.