Reply to a ticket using an email command or Is there really a use case for Public Notes?

As an agent, I receive by email a notification that there is a new ticket or that the client has answered an existing ticket.

Now if I want to provide an answer/solution, I got two possible approaches:

• I go online (on freshdesk web site) and answer the ticket by clicking **reply**.
• I can also reply to the notification email I just received (through my email software).

In the later case, it will just add a "Public Note" whereas in the first case, my answer will appear as an outbound email. The notification workflow is quite different as well.
However, as an agent, what I would really like is that my email (sent from outlook or whatever) is being sent directly to the customer and not added as a public note.

I don't really get the point of having a "public note" concept. I mean in which way is the "Public Note" different from the "Outbound email" (reply to the customer from the web interface). Does it hold any specific value? Isn't the customer supposed to read it? I can understand the need for  Private Notes but not really for public notes though I'm ready to read some use case and change my mind.

That said, now that this "Public Note" concept is available it won't be possible to remove it.
However, I think there is an easy way to improve things for those who just want to have one type of answer (whatever the origin of the answer - email or web interface) by using an email command:

• As an agent, when replying to a notification, I can use an email command that tells freshdesk to consider this email as a reply to the customer as if I had used the web interface.
• A global setting could also be made available so that reply to notifications from an agent will convert into a reply to the customer by default rather than a public note.