so here are my findings. i have been debating between using zammad or uv desk as my help desk solution. both are great at what they do and i have been testing this along with my mail solutions. which is why it has been hard to find what is good and not good since i am juggling those two. so here are my findings per helpdesk solution along with the mail solutions.

uv desk:
this is a great solution for public facing knowledge base and a great web interface for creating tickets and logging in. the setup is a bit more involved compared to zammad, but as long as documentation is followed, it works great. the mailing solutions works great, but it does require a manual refresh of the imap/pop3 configured mailbox. this can be automated with cron, but regardless, it works well.

zammad:
another great open source project with a ton of support and a sizeable community. the setup is very simple with docker and as long as you know how to deploy stacks, it should work well. following documentation is key as it can get involved depending on how you install it. i recommend docker, but if you are using proxmox, there is an install script for that. i outline the issues i faced in my previous zammad post. the emailing feature is a bit complicated as it will attempt to send the notifications through the fqdn of zammad. meaning that if you setup the web url as ‘zammad.domain.com’, it will send the outgoing as ‘[email protected]’. this is an issue has it will be sending email through a subdomain. and if we look at the domain records, we are only authorized to send mail from the root domain or @domain.com. the fix is easy as you just need to change the notification sender to your root domain address.

zoho: you will have to upgrade to their paid tier, mail lite or higher, which includes the imap/pop3 features. along with some nice business features like a custom url for accessing the web mail. zoho also comes with its own app which is great. as long as dns is setup properly, mailing through your custom domain will work. the caveat with zoho mail is that it charges ten dollars per user per year. so imagine having many inboxes, that will climb in price yearly. each user does get their own five gigabytes of storage which is great.

purelymail: this is a paid service as well. no always free tier, but there is a free trial that gives you fifty cents of credit to try their services out. there is an outgoing mail limit that i have found. while i was testing the email services, i ran into smtp issues, and it turns out that i have reached the limit of the emails that i can send out. the service charges ten dollars per year, no catches or anything really. meaning that you can create as many inboxes as you wish, and it is a pay as you go pricing model. so if you only need to send mail here and there, you will not use up the ten dollars. pretty much the idea is to add ten dollars of credit, and what is used at the end of year, it will be taken away from your account credit. you can add more if needed, and they provide advanced pricing if you do exceed ten dollars per year. it is a one man show, so support can take a few days, but the reviews are great for the support he gives. most importantly, this is is in beta, so expect bugs and issues, and feel free to send the creator support and recommendations.

takeways: objectively, purelymail is cheaper per year than zoho mail. zoho mail does come with the zoho suite as it competes with the bigger corps like google workspace and microsoft office/outlook. if you are looking for a cheap mail service that is also reliable, purelymail will do the job well. and for my case, i have already migrated to purelymail for my main domain. mainly because i need imap services for syncing mailboxes for help desk. my second domain will still be running zoho mail as i like their always free tier, and i believe five users is more than enough and along with that is unlimited alias’. and the five gigabytes of storage per user is great. meaning twenty-five gigabytes of storage spread across five users.

uv desk is great for public facing help desk solution that is tailors for free lancing, consulting, or for anyone to submit issues. i think overall it looks simple and professional. the functionality is great when configured properly. has options for users and groups for assigning agents and administrators. i found the banner option very nice for a heads up for certain issues. it also has white labeling, so you can customize uv desk to resemble your brand/organization. has options for captchas, but no sso options or totp or mfa.

zammad is great for an internal help desk solution for teams and organizations. it has support for external options like email, chat, feedback forms, and more. that would mean exposing the service to the public web. depending on how you do it, is up to you. it provides all the code snippets you need. the setup is more simpler with docker and the web ui is simple and smooth. includes options for third party login like socials, saml 2.0, sso, and ldap. i think the emailing function is very convenient, by emailing the configured email address, zammad will create a ticket and notify the agents.