Best way to implement helpdesk functionality?

[Kevin]

Hi List-

I'm running cyrus-imapd-2.2.8 and cyrus-sasl-2.1.19-r1 on an x86 Gentoo
Linux box and trying to figure out the best way to implement some sort
of helpdesk functionality.  I have O'Reilly's book _Managing IMAP_ and
it discusses both shared mailboxes and the bulletin board mailbox (owned
by system but with access rights by several), but I'm not sure that
either will do everything that I'd like.  In particular, I'd like the
following functionality:

1) email sent to info at example.com gets sent directly to some list of
maybe 4-8 "helpdesk" users (cyrus mailboxes) for action by any one of
them;
2) replies to any of those messages (the ones that were written To:
info at example.com) from any of this list of 4-8 helpdesk users get sent
to all of the helpdesk users (so that all of them know when a message
has been replied to and needs no other action);
3) state of the mailbox preserved between access by different users
(again, so that all of them can see what's been done already by someone
else);
4) any of these replies (written by pam at example.com or joe at example.com)
actually have (as From: fields) the original address info at example.com
and no trace of the actual user's email address.

Any suggestions on the best way to implement this sort of functionality?
I'm sure that (1) could be done with the MTA (postfix-2.1.5).  I'm not
sure about (2)...  would sieve accomplish that?  Would that be the best
way to do it?  I know that (3) should be easy enough with a shared
mailbox (not a bulletin board).  But (4) looks like it's
non-trivial---would sieve do this?  Best choice to do it?

Also, the ORA book (4 years old) mentions that "group" functionality is
implemented with the authentication system (for unix authentication,
the /etc/group file).  Still true?  I'm using a LDAP directory for
authentication.  Anything special I need to do with Cyrus to make it
aware of group memberships in this case?

I'm thinking the helpdesk functionality must be relatively common and so
perhaps there is some feature that's been added in the last 4 years and
is not mentioned in the book that would implement this in a very slick
way.

Also, I'm sure there must be several different ways to implement this
functionality, say by allowing users who authenticate to be in the group
helpdesk to be authorized to "become" the user "helpdesk" and handle it
that way, without a shared mailbox per se.  But I'm not sure how well
certain clients (MS Outlook Express for example) support that sort of
thing, and I'm trying to keep this solution as portable across IMAP
clients as possible.  I'd appreciate hearing thoughts on alternative
methods to accomplish this functionality.

Any ideas?  What have other folks done?  Is there a good reference for
this subject?  I've read my book, looked through the archives, and
googled around, but haven't found anything really useful.

Also, how do I configure my IMAP client to subscribe to the anonymous
IMAP folder imap://cyrus.andrew.cmu.edu/archive.info-cyrus?  Should I
use a username of anonymous and no password?  When I do, I get an IMAP
folder, but it's not the list archive.  When I use a username of
archive.info-cyrus, I'm prompted for a password.  I tried "anonymous"
here, but no luck.  Any hints?

-- 
Kevin
http://www.gnosys.us

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