This is really a shot from the hip, but today we where discussing a new Umbraco site we are working on. A colleague showed me a function in Facebook where you:

1. Get an email from Facebook telling you that someone has posted something on your wall (including the actual message that was posted)
2. You click "reply" in your email client and in the new reply email you write a response
3. Send your email
4. Within seconds the reply you wrote in the email is posted on your Facebook wall as a reply to the original message. None of the quoted (garbage) content is part of the reply, so there is some form of email parsing going on before it's posted on the wall.

Now we are wondering if something like this would be possible to pull off in Umbraco? More specific, what we'd like to do is:

1. A website visitor writes something, like a question, in a form on the public (Umbraco) website
2. The written text (question) is saved as a new Umbraco node
3. Umbraco dispatches an email with the content to a predefined email address
4. The person with the email address replies to the mail that Umbraco sent
5. Umbraco somehow get's a hold of this email, parses the content and extracts the reply and saves it as the content of a propery of the node

This would be really useful in cases where you want people to be able to answer questions or respond to stuff that is posted to the site but you want to keep it simple; not having to teach them how to log in and edit content in the Umbraco back-end. The second benefit is that people often check their email. If you require of them to log in on a special page to check if there are any new questions they need to address, they will not do it as often (if at all).

So, what do you think? Is this a useful or just a stupid function? Can it be done? If it's very complicated, are there easier ways of accomplishing something similar?

I'd love to hear your opinion!