It would be great if aC, would sport emailing functionality like BaseCamp (or Pipelinedeals) has today. It basically allows you to reply to discussions with emails, which are sent to the platform.
I've got some PHP code (based on smarty) which I'd be happy to donate if it will help your process along. Parsing emails is the hardest bit, matching them up to existing tickets is not difficult.
What do you think?