Many organizations depend on email communication with their customers for providing initial contact for customer support. While manually reading and managing email-based support requests works for some organizations, many companies prefer to have those inbound requests processed as cases, so that they can be automatically assigned to the appropriate support representative, and tracked. There is an interesting tech note for building inbound Email-to-Case functionality via the sforce platform.

For a developer familiar with sforce it’d take a couple hours to do a prototype, a week to fully develop. If this is a hot button issue at your organization and you don’t have the development resources to build it, you can also engage salesforce.com’s professional services team to scope out the project.