How does the idonethis.com service work?

Question

PHP

The following question is of interest, how the idonethis service is programmatically arranged, everything seems to be extremely simple, but still, who knows the technical side of this service, tell me

Answer 1

If I understand correctly, then a letter is simply sent there periodically to the user with his current task ... and that's not the point. The user replies to the letter, the server receives his answer, parses and saves. So?
Then what is the question? How to receive responses on the server? Unfortunately, I didn’t use this service and I don’t plan to register there, so I can tell you what only if you describe in more detail what exactly causes you difficulties.

Answer 2

I liked the functionality, and began to slowly understand it, and I realized that a mail robot rises on the server, intervals for scanning even mail are set, and then how does it upload the results to the web interface? Plus, there is the possibility of uploading them to the Google calendar, I think this is most likely through the API. But how does he cope with a large flow of letters? And a little more delusional question, the principle of the web interface, if there are links to similar topics, I will be glad.
Of course there was such a desire. True, a little for other purposes, more as a control for the company, so I began to dig this topic :)

Answer 3

What's the problem with doing this? Apparently written in django. But not the point.
Let's say we have rails. We put some https://github.com/titanous/mailman and check mail every N times. We take the incoming letter, take the mail from there and look in our database for the user with this email - if there is, we take the text of the letter and put it in the calendar. For example, each new line is 1 completed task. If there is no such user, we do nothing, delete the letter, for example.
You can go further and, for example, parse the subject of the letter, if there is, for example, such [work] [development], we add tasks to the calendar or the work and development categories.
The face of the site and the monitoring of email itself can be in general in different languages. The face can be on anything, a bot for monitoring, you can write in java, for example, what would be faster.
Xs is it worth watching imap constantly or taking pop3 once a minute, for example - only then you can rewrite or change it.
I'm not saying that it's easy to write, but in a week or two you can make the first prototype. True, I would not bother with the calendar as that service, but would make the categories - it's much clearer that way.
But if there is a designer, it's not a problem to display it in the form of a calendar - I'm just a bad designer.