I am looking for free ticketing system to make it work as a helpdesk. It must have piping (email piping) facility, so that each time a reply/ticket is opened, staff gets notified.

Pl. advise.

Almost all of today's helpdesk/ticketing software includes email piping.

I did miss the "free" part of your question. you may want to look at OSTicket.

Cerberus has a single mailbox free version. We used it up until we switched to ClientExec. It's very good.

I'm sorry if this isn't the answer you're looking for, but: Why free? Honestly it's better to invest in quality software than to use cheap/free alternatives when you're running a hosting company... Just a suggestion

I agree with you on this issue. You SHOULD get something that's of good quality. If your running a business why cheap out? Don't tell me you'd install a phpbb support board too :p

If your running a business, you SHOULD put in the extra funds to get good quality products, such as a forum for support and ticketing software. Yes, it's a bit costly, but in the end, it all pays off

well not everyone wants to invest money in to their business but instead scrape by on opensource software. On some of our projects we've tried osTicket and found it to have a fair few problems and require bug fixes and lots of messing about before it'd even load. Every time we used it we gave up. On one of my free hosting projects we're using hesk, no email piping but it's working well.

If you want to go far, I would suggest spending your money for a more reliable and suitable help desk. I would recommend kayako.

OS Ticket

The piping wont work in the default installation. Check out their forums and in 1 thread its mentioned on how to use it.

I completely agree

You could try

TrellisDesk

We used it when we first started out and it did exactly what we wanted and more.

I Highly recommend WHMCS! Easy to use help desk with all the goodies such as the knowledge base and so forth.

OP is looking for a free system.

I don't think there is a problem starting with a free support system and then later decide to upgrade.

take a look at Cerberus and also SupporTrio free version

Customer service is extremely important in my opinion, and while there are some nice products out there for free, really, you get what you pay for.

I agree that there is nothing wrong with starting small and upgrading later, but at the same time, any investment made into quality and support will only help to pull one out of the small-time period.