I require a messaging system on my rails app where users need to be able to reply to each other without logging into the site itself. I've seen how this could be done in Basecamp; you simply reply to the email and Basecamp takes care of the rest, forwarding the message to the other parties.
I haven't been able to find any gems/plugins to do this. I did find the fetcher gem though, which I am planning to use. Note that I am using Google Apps to host email and this is what I'm planning to do:
I could set up a catch-all account, which forwards all emails received to a single account. Fetcher then retrieves the message when a cron job executes from this account, reads the sent-to field, parses out the hash and looks it up against the database.
Presumably, when users message each other, a conversation is generated, which has_many messages. Each conversation generates its own unique hash (that's used in the email reply-to field).
Am I on the right track and what other gems are there that can help me with this?