Hi guys, Thanks for the responses. Gene Parks is right that I want to run everything from e-mail, whilst taking advantage of the Web backend as a history/repository/analysis resource. Stefan, you raise a good point which is that locking is difficult via e-mail (i.e. I start writing a reply to a ticket and someone else gets in there first and we both end up replying to the message -- annoying). In our situation we only have a small number of agents and it is usually fairly intuitive who should answer each support query, so I believe the locking issue is slightly reduced. You could resolve the problem by sending out new ticket notifications to each agent. If an agent wants to reply they just click a link to lock it to them, or reply with 'lock' in the message body. If someone has already locked an error message could come back. Then the agent can reply to the success message, with the reply going straight to the original ticket raiser. An auto-unlock kicks in after a while. Having the OTRS database accessible out of an IMAP server is a brilliant idea -- that would integrate with our local systems pretty nicely, but suspect that is quite a bit more work. I think just a basic email command interface like Martin suggests would be a good enough solution for us in the first instance. Should I go about trying to hack one together, or would it be better to leave it to an OTRS expert? Many thanks, Nick.