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Eduardo Villão
Eduardo Villão

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GitHub Issues Is Going to Be My Support Channel

#automation #github #productivity #tools

I run a few products at once. Each one has its own domain, each domain has its own support inbox. I'm done managing a different tool for every single one of them. Here's the fix: support becomes an Github issue.

A customer emails support@mydomain.com. That turns into an issue in one of my repos, private, mine only. I reply by commenting, same as I reply to anything else on GitHub. The customer gets my reply in their inbox and never has to know GitHub is involved at all.

No new account for the customer. No new tool for me. History stays versioned, searchable, and I inherit everything that already works on top of Issues for free: labels, projects, saved replies, the mobile app to reply on the go.

The flow

  1. Email lands at support@domain.com
  2. Cloudflare Email Routing forwards it for free
  3. A Worker parses it and creates the issue through the GitHub API
  4. I reply in the comments
  5. A GitHub webhook (issue_comment) fires another Worker
  6. That Worker sends my reply back as an email

Two small Workers, one free routing rule, the GitHub API. Nothing new to run.

The real value isn't the bridge

Email-to-issue is a weekend of glue code, that part's obvious. The layer actually worth building sits on top of it: every day, an AI sweeps the open issues, checks each one against everything I've already closed, and flags the matches: "this looks like #142, already solved." For each match it drafts a reply based on how I handled it last time.

I open my queue and the context is already there, the draft is already there, I just edit and hit send. No auto-reply, no black box answering customers on its own. I'm still the one deciding what goes out, the AI just kills the part where I retype the same answer for the sixth time.

Does this exist already?

I checked. Plenty of helpdesk tools integrate with GitHub (Zendesk, HappyFox, HelpDesk.com), but they all keep the ticket in the helpdesk and just mirror it to GitHub for the dev team's visibility. One small tool, HubDesk, does the real version of this, email becomes the issue, no helpdesk behind it, but there's no visible traction behind it: no reviews, no case studies, a GitHub org with one follower.

If you run a product solo and you're tired of a different support tool for every domain: does this solve something real for you, or is it a problem only I have?

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