Question

We are currently implementing private messaging in our asp.net mvc app and we have come to the conclusion that we would like to make it work like github does… meaning we would like the user to receive the message both through our site and to his email inbox(this is somewhat easy to achieve with mvcmailer nuget).. but we would also like the option to have the user reply to the email (through his email client) and have that email be sent to our app (if you have used guthubs private messaging you should know what I mean)….. what is a common approach to implementing this feature?

Answer 1

See my comment regarding how to read emails from a mailbox.

I would use a message bus so that you are not limited to just internal and email notifications, for example you may wish to add SMS notifications in the future.

You may want to check out MassTransit or NServiceBus although for something like this it may be easier to just create your own.

public class Message {
    public string Title {get;set;}
    public string Body {get;set;}
}

public interface IMessageBus {
    void Send(Message message);
}

public interface IMessageHandler {
    void Handle(Message message);
}

public class InternalMessageHander : IMessageHandler {
    public void Handle(Message message) {
        // send internal message
    }
}

public class EmailMessageHandler : IMessageHandler {
    public void Handle(Message message) {
        // send email
    }
}

Your IMessageBus implementation would need to locate all the handlers (I would use an IoC container for this).

If you need to process large volumes of messages then I would recommend handing these off to a queue and processing these asynchronously (both MassTransit and NServiceBus support message queues but you could just as easily use a simple database table).

As far as reading emails, I would have background task that connects to the mailbox, downloads emails, parses them and updates your content.