Creating drupal content (especially issue tracking) with email -- is mailhandler the only way?

the #1 unmet requirement for converting my entire day job's content management needs to drupal is the fact that we currently handle a lot of our content via email. i need a way to plug these existing email addresses into my new drupal site and have the content flow in both directions.

in particular, we use email-based issue-tracking systems, and our entire userbase is used to sending support questions and bug reports to an email address, not going to a web site and filling out a form. similarly, there's a big global email list where people can ask support questions and other users try to answer. this serves much the same function as the forums on drupal.org: clueful users who aren't quite clueful enough to be developers can handle the 1st-tier support questions, and leave the developers more time to write code instead of answering silly questions.

for the forums, that seems pretty straight forward. each post to the list that starts a new thread is dumped into a new forum post. replies to that particular email are dumped as comments to the forum post. if people use the site to add comments, those just get blasted out to the list with the appropriate subject (and ideally, In-Reply-To header) so that everyone's email clients can properly thread the message. i believe there's already a module that does this. any suggestions/preferences on the best?

for issue tracking, i'm going to be using the project module (for a bunch of reasons, don't ask). ;) project already supports getting email notifications whenever anything happens on the web forms. however, there's currently no way to allow project to generate new issues (or replies to existing issues) via an email interface. all i know of is the mailhandler module, and i'm not even sure that works with project issues and follow-ups. plus, i don't like the fact that the architecture is that mailhandler wakes up on hook_cron() to parse an imap folder. i'd rather a new message coming into a mailbox was stuffed into a script that pushed the content into the DB immediately. i can't have a 1 hour delay on processing new emails, some of these support questions are high-prio, etc.

should i write my own special-case code to handle project issues and followups? is there a more generic solution that already exists? is there a more generic solution i should implement that would solve my problems but also be useful to other people? anyone else interested in any of this and want to work together on it? any pointers or wisdom would be most appreciated.

thanks!
-derek