Looking for a good and simple help desk solution for customer service/email management.
using traditional email allows questions (in help-desk language: cases) to slip through the cracks, and there is no real way to assign emails/cases to a specific team member.
I found desk.com and helpscout.net to be best in replacing regular email support, it's simple and easy to use, and especially that you can use it as your normal email client.
However, I'm looking from something that can be installed on our own server, but similar to the 2 listed above. I found smartertrack to be very powerful, but may be a little too overwhelmingly powerful, the many options there makes it a bit complicated to use right out of the box.
You don't mention any preferences or requirements for the technology stack and that might be a factor since you'll be running it yourself. Request Tracker (RT) runs on a standard LAMP stack (you can use just about any Linux distro) and has full email support for interacting with tickets. It works well for helpdesks, has configurable templates for auto-responding, has articles for saving common answers for re-use, etc.