Help Scout

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Build me a shared inbox that replaces Help Scout — and know what makes this ALMOST.

Two things carry the verdict. **Email threading that survives every client's quoting style** is far harder than it looks, and getting it wrong splits one customer's conversation into five. And **collision detection**, so two agents do not answer the same person at once, which is the difference between a shared mailbox and a mess. Both are buildable; neither is a weekend.

STACK
- Node 20+ with Fastify, server-rendered HTML with a little vanilla JS
- SQLite through better-sqlite3, WAL mode, with FTS5
- Caddy in front

THE DATA MODEL
- mailboxes: id, name, address, signature_md, auto_reply_md, business_hours_json
- customers: id, email, name, traits_json, first_seen_at, last_seen_at
- conversations: id, mailbox_id, customer_id, subject, status, assignee_id, priority, first_response_at, resolved_at, snooze_until, created_at
- threads: id, conversation_id, kind, direction, author_kind, author_id, body_html, body_text, body_stripped, headers_json, message_id, in_reply_to, references_json, created_at — kind is a reply, a note, or a system event
- attachments stored by hash with the type from content
- viewers: conversation_id, user_id, at, is_typing — in memory, expired quickly
- saved_replies, tags, workflows, and an append-only events table

THREADING, WHICH IS THE FIRST HARD PART
- Match on Message-ID, then In-Reply-To, then References. Only then fall back to subject plus participants, and never on subject alone — two customers writing 'Re: my order' must not become one conversation
- Strip quoted history for display and keep the whole message. Every client quotes differently: some prefix with angle brackets, some wrap in a div with a known class, some prepend a header line in the sender's own language. Collect real examples and build a stripper against them, with a fixture per client
- Show the stripped view with a control to expand the original, always. A stripper that eats part of a customer's actual message is worse than one that leaves quoting in
- Detect automatic replies and bounces from their headers and never turn them into conversations, or the inbox starts talking to itself
- Outbound sets the headers that keep the thread intact, and a per-recipient send cap so a loop cannot mail somebody four hundred times

COLLISION DETECTION, THE SECOND
- When somebody opens a conversation, that is recorded and shown to everybody else: who is looking, and who is typing
- A warning before sending if another reply was sent while yours was being written
- Assignment as the stronger form: an assigned conversation is somebody's, and the list makes that obvious
- None of it needs a socket per user — a small polling endpoint is enough and far less to operate

THE INBOX
- One list with filters: unassigned, mine, by tag, by status, by mailbox
- Keyboard driven, because this is used all day
- Notes visibly different from replies and impossible to send to the customer by accident. That confusion is the failure a customer sees, and it is unrecoverable
- Saved replies by shortcut with variable substitution
- Snooze with a wake time, which is how a conversation waiting on somebody else stops cluttering the queue
- Merge two conversations from the same person, keeping both histories

DELIVERABILITY
- Send from your own domain with SPF, DKIM and DMARC, documented in the README
- Inbound by provider webhook or IMAP, with a retry and an alert if the feed stops. An inbox that silently stops receiving is the worst failure here, so monitor the age of the newest message

THE HELP CENTRE
- Collections and articles in Markdown, public, searchable, with its own sitemap and canonical URLs
- Search from inside a reply, to insert an article
- Failed searches recorded — an empty result is a request for an article

MEASURING
- First response time, resolution time, conversations per person, by day and hour, computed at query time from events. Never stored totals

OPERATIONS
- .env: DATABASE_PATH, STORAGE_PATH, BASE_URL, SMTP_URL, IMAP_URL, SESSION_SECRET, HASH_SALT
- Migrations on boot, each once; nightly backup off the machine, restore script
- Health endpoint checking both mail directions and the age of the newest inbound message

WHAT MATTERS MOST
Threading and never losing a message. Point a real address at it for a week and read everything that arrives — an inbox that drops or splits mail is unusable from the first day.