How to use open source bugtracking (for customers)?

At the moment support requests / bug reports made by customers are coming in by mail. It is getting harder to organize priorities and stay at the helm of all this. So I am loo开发者_运维百科king for bugtracking(?) tools. Not all reports are bugs of course, sometimes it's just feature request or support requests.

So my question is: whicht open source bugtracker / support request handling tool do you recommend? I know Mantis which seems to be my front runner for a more elaborate evaluation, but I already worked with it (as a reporter / contributor) and found the GUI a little cumbersome. Another issue is that I thought about using the tool for multiple website projects of different customers.

Intuitively I would prefer to run only one instance of the tool for all projects to have a better overview of all critical issues (independently of the project). Of course customer A should not be able to see customer Bs request (but every customer can have multiple reporting accounts) Is Mantis able to handle that? Can you recommend any other alternatives?

P.S.: I heard about Jira, but I will try to find a free tool for my first try.

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It's possible to use email with Mantis, so that you can get incoming email (directly or by forwarding) to Mantis.

Then you can have a workflow in Mantis, f.ex. have an incoming project and customer projects, and you can send email with bcc Mantis and subject containing issue number (I use [1234] as a pattern).

I haven't used other issue trackers as much, but my experience with a customized Mantis is good regarding different kinds of issues and using with email.

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Since you're turned to Open source, I'd say install a project management platform like Launchpad, redmine... etc and then create a project for each of your clients (of course you can have multiple accounts for only one client). The bug tracker in these platforms can serve as a support request service.

I'd go for Launchpad because it also has the Q/A feature and blueprints, and is also nice looking and very very user-friendly. And also damn easy to install on a Ubuntu Server.

Kind regards