"Catch" mails using Rails (some sort of ticket software)?

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hi all

I'm developing a website where DJ's can be booked. To book a DJ, the user can fill out a booking request form, which is saved as a Booking model instance.

Now I'd like to save all correspondence (which is done through email) in the database, so I can later browse my old bookings and can exactly see what I've written to the requester and what he has written back.

So I wonder how I can "catch" mails using Rails?

The idea is the following:

1) The user (user@example.com) creates a booking request. 2) The request is saved as a Booking instance 3) A mail with the booking details is sent to my email (josh@example.com) with a unique subject (e.g. Booking request #123); the sender of the email is bookings@example.com 4) I can reply to the email, which is catched by Rails. Rails evaluates the subject (e.g. Re: Booking request #123), saves the content of the mail into the database and forwards the mail to the user (user@example.com) 5) The user replies the same way...

Now, is this very hard to implement? Where can I find extensive informations about this topic?

Thanks a lot for help, Josh

2

Nobody can point me into the right direction...?

3

One approach might be to use an open source MDA that uses mysql as a message store, setup DRb to poll every 5 minutes… The benefit of this approach is that you get all the spam filtering, etc. from the MDA; wouldn’t want to reinvent those wheels. Polling is a drag, so if the MDA has a notification system, that would be better, and if it were ReSTful, integration w/ RoR would be a breeze.

Zimbra’s a pretty good one with open source option and mysql store, and since it’s open source, they either have good api’s for things like notification or you can add it yourself.

Hope this helps,

m