I'm wondering how to achieve that nice feature I see on many websites today: when having conversations on social networks like Facebook or Linkedin, you can always answer an online message or status (which is not an email), by answering the email notification you receive. How do they achieve that?
As far as I can tell, I'd see two options:
Configure a mail server to fetch the emails and transmit the information to a Python (in my case) script to handle the data and save a database record that can be simply displayed afterwards on the website
Have a Python script running in the background, checking the mail server for incoming emails every few seconds (via pop3 or something)
Is there any other option? Has somebody already implemented this? What are the main pitfalls to look at? I'm asking this because I'd like to implement something similar on a web application I'm currently working on.
Thanks!
J
EDIT: I found this link which partially answers my question already: Django/Python: email reply is updated to site