Generic email accounts. Love to Hate Them

No matter where you work, you are almost certain to run into generic e-mail accounts. There are some places that you are going to have to use them. But what do you do with them?

Some departments are prime candidates for generic email accounts. These are typically departments that deal with outside entities, and ones that need some sort of continuity when staff changes or goes on vacation. Say "Accounts Payable", "Accounts Receivable" and "Human Resources" are good candidates (not to mention "Postmaster", "Abuse", "webmaster", "Hostmaster", and any other pseudo-required addresses)

What to do with them?
Option 1) Just set a person up to pull the messages via POP/IMAP, and let them deal with everything from there. I think this is the worst of the three options I list here. You know darn well that whoever has this account set up isn't going to remember the password to the account, you aren't going to be able to enforce good password security, and if you need to "move" the account to someone else for whatever reason, you'll probably have to reset the password.

Option 2) Don't actually create a mailbox, but rather set up a mail alias. This avoids the problems listed above, but creates its own set. namely that the poor schmuck that gets these messages will have to filter them him- or her-self, and that if something should happen, the next person doesn't have access to historical messages.

Option 3) set up some sort of "Ticket" system that can tie into your email system. Each message that comes in either creates a new ticket, or is attached to an existing ticket. This way anybody with appropriate authorization can get access to any old messages, and you can have multiple people with access to the system each dealing with things, and actions can be logged, I.E. "Invoice Received & imported into Accounting system, waiting to pay pending notification from receiving dept." and if the primary person is on vacation, whoever is filling the position can see what is going on without having to change credentials, forward messages, etc.

This falls under the category of "more work up-front solves problems later on"